Canadian Values

26 Wednesday Apr 2017

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Narrative

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Christendom, conservatism, Enlightenment, Greco-European philosophy, History, Islam, literacy, monotheism, politics, property rights, spirituality

Posting 105

Tags: politics, history, Greco-European philosophy, spirituality, Enlightenment, literacy, Christendom, Islam, monotheism, property rights, conservatism

There certainly was a long history of conflict and animosity between European Christendom and the ‘empire’ of Islam. That history of conflict included the Christian crusades beginning in the eleventh century, as well as both the Islamic Turkish conquest of Constantinople and the “reconquest” of Spain by Christian armies in the fifteenth century. Christendom’s fear of being encircled by Islam at that time inspired its push westward across the Atlantic, and so in part, inspired its subsequent global imperialism. However, since then, an historical singularity has occurred, and almost incredibly, the western cultural system has moved beyond its Judeo-Christian cultural heritage, so that the twenty-first century situation is nothing like a replay of the pre-modern “clash of civilizations”.

It is simply not true, for example, that gender equality is a Judeo-Christian value. Neither Jewish nor Christian culture treats women as equal to men, and that is a glaring dystopian feature of the patriarchal legacy of father-god monotheism. Democracy isn’t a Judeo-Christian idea either, but rather an idea from ancient Greece, long before the Christian era and independent of ancient Judaic influence. The Greek idea of democracy was associated with a concept of political equality with strict limitations but with potential for expansion. That potential had to wait a long time as a weak minority report within Christendom, in remnants of a Stoic, humanist influence, sometimes buried in monastic libraries. It was given some significant boosts in a number of subsequent European cultural developments: the movement for universal literacy in vernacular languages from around the time of Wycliffe (1380’s), violently resisted by the Church; again, in the context of the Renaissance fascination with ancient Greco-Roman paganism came the launch of the printing press in the fifteenth century; and once again in the sixteenth century the Protestant Reformation’s emphasis on mass literacy, and the subsequent development of the Republic of Letters outside the reach of institutions. It was dissident philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century Enlightenment who built on all that deep groundwork and used philosophical ideas of innate rationality, equality, individual human dignity and rights, secularism, cosmopolitanism, and representative democracy to launch a world-changing critique of their Christian society, until then dominated by dynastic monarchies in alliance with hierarchies of Christian clergy and military aristocracy already well along in looting the world in their brutal imperialism. So, the Enlightenment did not appear out of nothing, like a bolt from the blue, but was another step in an enduring dance entangling cultural legacies with the emerging experience of new generations of humans. The values of modern urban democracies (often still aspirational) should be described as radical Enlightenment values, not Judeo-Christian values. The Enlightenment assertion of equality, based on the universal dignity merited by inherent rationality (related to linguistic competence and literacy), was in dramatic opposition to the prevailing Christian norms based on the dark myth of inherent evil, original sin. Given this history, the cultural conflict we are living through now features remnants of the monotheist religions of the Middle East, all adorations of patriarchal inequality, on one side, against more recent developments of an individualistic humanism from ancient Greek philosophy on the other. This isn’t just a clash between Greco-Roman vs Judaic cultural legacies. This goes deeper. The ancient Greek rationalist philosophers found the portal beyond culture into elemental spirituality, which turned out to be individual as defined by the individual human body, so these different ideas cannot dovetail into a symbiotic coexistence. They are fundamentally incompatible and opposed to one another, founding the unbridgeable cultural divide between conservative and progressive political forces.

Conservatism and Property

Proponents of political conservatism, heirs of patriarchal monotheism, claim to champion individualism, but in conservative ideology, property rights take the place of individual human rights. Ownership of property, frequently including people made into property by being entirely deprived of rights, was the crucial marker of value and status in the hierarchical social order of pre-Enlightenment Christendom. Individuals with the most property have the most rights in the patriarchal worldview, and distribution of the world’s property was mostly completed long ago, establishing “facts on the ground” that conservatives strive to preserve. Property possession brings with it not only an obsession with guns and protection by violence, but also the “us against them” package of emotional triggers. The conservative claim to individualism comes down to placing supreme value on ownership of property, which has an inherent male bias from the long history of patriarchal dominance. Property rights are so dominant in conservative ideology that the holding of legal title to property by corporations confers on them the status of individual persons. This whole property rights focus creates an entirely bogus individualism because holding possession of property is absolutely dependant on a vast organizational support of laws, courts, lawyers, and weaponized enforcement. Conservatism is mainly about preventing or at least minimizing redistribution of property (wealth) by sovereign institutions. Sovereign institutions are otherwise very dear to the hearts of property hoarders because such institutions have the armed power to protect and defend property possession. However, there is a vulnerability in that sovereign power because if it falls under certain influences and ideas of justice, it also has the innate potential to enforce the redistribution of property. When sovereign governments come under the influence of people and ideologies in favour of material equality, then the forces of conservatism push for the limitation of sovereign power.

Andrew Coyne, for example (in the National Post, November 6, 2015), has claimed that the essence of conservatism is the limitation of power, but such a claim is true only in the context of cultural pressures for enhancing material equality. The reality is that property rights are so central to conservatism that on that view the institutions of sovereignty must be restrained when exposed to democracy, because broadly based electorates might not be unreservedly dedicated to protecting property rights. In this context, the conservative rhetoric of limiting the power of elites is also misleading. Conservatives have no problems with lethal military elites (special forces), with sporting elites glorifying masculinity, investor elites symbolizing success, religious elites policing conformity, or elites of heroic patriots as universal role models. The rhetoric against “elites” is mainly resistance to the rationally based individualism accomplished by education, and as such a form of nostalgia for the pre-Enlightenment world ruled by religious supervision, fervent nationalism, and patriarchal family culture. The adulation of pretty much all elites is core conservatism, called “celebrating excellence” or “appreciating exceptional success”. It is practically the state religion of the U.S.A., although actualized in such a way as not to disrupt the traditional hierarchy of wealth and power. Conservative adulation of excellence and exceptional success excludes only those founded on advanced literacy and education, and that is a crucial lens for seeing into the heart of conservatism. Intellectual achievement is the portal to the spirituality beneath Enlightenment individualism, emphasizing spiritual qualities and competencies inherent in every individual, independent of possession of trophy properties, and as such tending toward a universal sociability in conflict with the “us against them” essentials of conservatism.

The current mass displacements of people from wars visited upon mainly Muslim countries by the Euro-American military/ political system is providing a pretext for anti-Enlightenment movements in the west to launch campaigns invoking the pre-modern “clash of civilizations” based on false claims that western culture is still Judeo-Christian and as such threatened by Muslim migration. This historical falsehood is presumably intended to resuscitate the appearance of relevance in outmoded Judeo-Christian beliefs, and inspire a resurgence of loyalty to the Christian legacy of authoritarian patriarchal society, fervent patriotism as a surrogate religion, communal adulation of warlike masculine virtues such as strength, competitive spirit, and kinetic action, restoring females as property, and reverting to attitudes that are anti-abortion and anti-gay. Such is conservatism. However, in the modern urban community such values are all widely and deeply contested by the legacies of Greek and European philosophical Enlightenment. The philosophic revolution, the rising prestige and urban spread of the kind of secular spiritual autonomy modelled in ancient philosophical thinking, is still advancing. Although the commanding heights, the institutions which structure the society, are all bastions of patriarchal culture, and we still live within that nexus of social supervision, we have less fear of, less trust in, and less emotional reliance on authorities of all kinds. Very slowly the historical singularity of Enlightenment individualism, and the kind of freedom and equality it carries, is dissolving the cultures inclined to be anti-Enlightenment. There is no reason to doubt that it will continue to dissolve the legacy cultures of any immigrant proponents of patriarchy. An irony of the current anti-Muslim campaign by conservative groups is that they share many core values with this culture they purport to oppose, because both are remnants of the patriarchal monotheist religions of the Middle East. Conservative groups are despising their own mirror image.

What is Patriarchy?

02 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Culture, Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Political Power, Subjectivity

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anarchic interconnection, Cogito ergo sum, dominance culture, Gender culture, History, ideality, interior individualism, language acquisition, literacy, nurture culture, patriarchy, politics, Renaissance, symbols and pageantry of dominance

This is dedicated to the happy memory of Weldon Matthews, scholar, artist, actor, teacher, playwright, producer, director, creative collaborator, friend.

Tags: patriarchy, history, politics, gender cultures, ideality culture, anarchic interconnection, dominance, symbols and pageantry of dominance, nurture, first-language acquisition, literacy, Renaissance, interior individualism, Cogito ergo sum.

History can be sketched as the career of relations among certain distinct cultural engines or streams, but three especially are comprehensively important. These three culture streams have very different values, models of relationship, and concepts of personal identity, and so endure an uneasy coexistence. One is a female managed, child-nurture-focused culture in which all human beings learn our first language and most other culture. This is the ongoing conversation between childhood innocence and adult sophistication. Adult sophistication is often morphing into something new, but childhood innocence is always basically ecstatic, curious, and eager to engage. This first-language-nurture culture is mainly female, thrives by cultivating collective support and sociability, emphasizing language and recognition of individual voices. Separate from that but vastly parasitic on it is a competitive alpha-trophy culture of dominance which developed into military and corporate culture and into sovereign states. Alpha culture is mainly male and worships and celebrates competition for dominance and the benefits of dominance. The key benefit of dominance is top-down human macro-parasitism, from which other benefits flow. Many such benefits are the symbols and pageantry of dominance, trophies, for example in the scale of property possession and in relationships marked by hierarchical inequality (master/slave). Money culture, market wealth, is a branch of dominance culture because the scale of property possession is crucial in the pageantry and symbolism of dominance. Part of alpha-trophy culture is denigration of alternative culture streams, defining them as inferior to and dependent on itself, and maintaining a sense of urgency about keeping them in some degree of dishonour and disgrace. The third stream is a spin-off from the cultural importance of language and conversation, namely scribal culture, the culture of literacy and literature, intellectual culture. Scribal schools, libraries, universities, and commercial publishing have cultivated this distinct culture of collective intelligence that features individual voices expressing a reading/writing persona as distinct from a strictly social persona. This culture cultivates a personally interior thinking life of interpretive and critical reading, writing, and long deliberation, is essentially androgynous and often celebrates originality, which is to say, anarchy, even though it is often cultivated by and within hierarchical organizations. Separate from all of these is every individual’s subjective innocence, which the immersion in culture and history can never smother completely. The essential identity of everyone as an individual is an active process of creative orientation, a personal interiority of spiritual non-actuality, intervening continuously in brute actuality as a particular embodiment. Individuals get deeply immersed in pre-existing streams of culture early in life, but creative thinking, reconceptualization, is performed entirely at the level of the individual.

Why Religions Don’t Count

Religions are also important culture streams, conservatories of a certain kind of metaphysical ideology. In general, religions counsel their flocks to seek refuge and tranquility in the promise of an eternal and other-worldly transcendence to be actualized in a distant future, and so to disengage from concerns about power and wealth in the empires of this world. By this token, religions universally advance a top-down cosmic orientation that depicts normal individuals at the bottom of a metaphysical chain of command, a placement that lacks both power and rights-meriting status. That places religions perfectly to serve as the “ministry of mystical justification” for alpha-trophy dominance culture, and they frequently partner with imperial organizations in pacification and control of the low-status masses. Religions have often placed high value on scribal culture as the guardian and interpreter of holy texts and codes of law elaborated from such texts. However, religions do not merit inclusion with the three culture streams sketched above because the hierarchy they model in their ideology and organization is derived wholesale from the culture of dominance, and the ethics of care and nurture they occasionally encourage is derived wholesale from the culture of nurture. As for scribal culture, although there was a very early association of writing with supernatural powers and magic, and with imperial organization, scribal culture developed in a way that makes it independently relevant wherever language-based ways of learning and understanding are involved, and ultimately cultivates the inscribing of individual voices, beyond the reach of other streams of culture. Intrinsic to scribal culture, although often uncredited, is an experience of spirituality that is completely at odds with the top-down centralized hierarchy typical in religions and traditional military-based institutions of sovereignty.

Why Class Struggle Doesn’t Count

The economic and political overclass, the class of patricians, the most dominant operators of dominance culture, oriented within old and highly developed ideologies sanctifying macro-parasitism in the patrician way of life, is certainly class conscious as a distinct social entity, but there is no equivalent but distinct worldview for a proletariat, a working or plebeian class. In fact, the culturally supplied conceptual reality within which working people orient ourselves is pervaded by the patrician ideology, the top-down metaphysical (religious) chain of command which sanctifies the existence of subordination. There is nothing intrinsic to the cultural legacies from “folk cultures” to seriously discredit the hierarchical metaphysics that anchors the patrician worldview. The conservatism of the privileged has often found an ally in proletarian conservatism. Proletarian males are carriers of alpha-trophy dominance culture just as much as males everywhere, because it represents the cultural ideals of masculinity. To the extent that proletarian class values are represented by socialism, they are derived wholesale from nurture culture. In any case, nobody but patricians wants there to be an enduring and culturally distinct proletarian class. The conclusion is that, in terms of historical political developments, the class of proletarians is not an autonomous engine. The opposition to competitive dominance culture has come from nurture culture and the literary culture of interior individualism.

The Three Streams

The three culture streams that are autonomous engines-of-community are all very ancient. The stream of scholarship goes back to the invention of writing from something like 5,000 years ago, plausibly in ancient Mesopotamian Sumer. Mastering the craft of literacy tends to form social bonds among its devotees. The alpha-trophy dominance culture found its ideal form in the conquering outpourings from the Great Eurasian Steppe, fountain of macro-parasitic herding culture. However, the first-language-nurture culture is surely the oldest, from the first human development of language between mother and child. Although these culture streams are autonomous to an important extent, having maintained their separate operations for thousands of years, they also survive by using, tolerating, and intermingling with each other. For example, dominance culture became the ideal of masculinity and so has a strong influence wherever there are men, especially men in groups devoted to physical strength, death-defying fearlessness, and kinetic action. Scholarly culture was a male preserve through most of its existence, and so the influence of the power-adulating culture of masculinity can be recognized in most intellectual work. For example, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) represents a number of philosophers who were childless and single privileged men immersed in a minority culture of alpha-male competition for dominance in the pageantry of seventeenth century Europe. It is not surprising that scholars or intellectuals in that setting grasped human nature as little more than egoism and a war of all against all, because that represents their ideal of masculinity. The parochial narrowness of their experience institutionalized a crucially distorted conception of human nature which is still plaguing us. In ancient times Plato and, much later, Augustine also were embedded in privileged male culture-pods. Those philosophers believed human attachment to be brittle and possible only as a gift from awe-inspiring power, requiring submission to power. Like Hobbes, they glorified the state as the greatest human achievement. The modern state was conceived and put into practice in the cultural matrix which made life interesting and fun for competitive alpha males. The other gender-based worldview, the realm of child-nurture, managed and cultivated by women, was effectively unknown, ignored, and despised by men from time out of mind, a cultured policy of willful blindness. The alpha-trophy culture claims the exclusive distinction of authentically expressing nature, but that claim is a ridiculous bias. The female cultivated culture of first-language-nurture has every bit as legitimate a claim to express nature (and a greater claim to intelligence), and points toward a social organization much different from the dominance pageantry of capitalism. When the value of nurturing children enters the picture, what is natural is co-operation, play, sharing, and love.

First-Language-Nurture Culture

That there is more than egoism motivating intelligences is illustrated most spectacularly in first-language-nurture collectives. Women and children do the work of connecting, caring, nurturing. Undefeated by all the macro-parasitism imposed on them by powerful collectives and individuals, a majority of women persist in their work of building connection with new human arrivals, engaging face to face through innumerable hours of an infant’s learning the ways of human interconnectedness and especially language. Mothers in that situation also find one another and share in building the culture of nurture and caring support. What parents, especially mothers, enjoy doing for their children, for each other, for other people’s children, for their parents, siblings, and friends is a conspicuous example of non-egoistic human interconnectedness. The first-language-nurture culture is robust and ancient, providing parenting, belonging within personal interconnectedness, language skills, and mutual adult support. The fact that the first-language-nurture culture and operations are not recognized as the foundation of social order reveals that nasty political forces are at work. That the common distribution of nurture has been ignored so consistently by social and economic philosophers, such as Hobbes and Adam Smith, who insisted that egoism alone is dominant in individuals, shows that the intended audience of such authors was the collective of privileged males enjoying benefits from acting out the egoistic alpha-trophy ideology of masculinity. There are two very distinct and contrasting gender-based world-views in the human community, and the one focused on the value of dominance recognizes the other (often unconsciously) as an existential threat.

The most pervasive motivational narrative in modern culture, the official meaning of modern life, could be described as self-definition through competition in the market economy. However, the dominance of such a view is another instance of a cultured contempt for the female-managed and child-centred value matrix, because the conversation with children and the social life which surrounds it have been more rewarding and meaningful all along and everywhere. As a force for social stability, the most undervalued asset is children. People continue to have children not because children are cute, or from brute instinct to continue the species, but because children are contributors to the vitality of the human conversation, crucial interlocutors for adults. The innocent curiosity, love of honest attachment, and delight in questioning and discovery characteristic of children is valuable in itself and not just as a stage to be rushed through on the way to adult mentality. Couples often reach a point of wanting to part company, but it is very rare for anyone to want to separate from their children. Even parents who become alienated from adult children reach out again when grandchildren appear. The bond with children is the strongest in human experience. (Children also keep re-inventing language instead of just passively learning it.) As a social foundation, then, we retain a focus on arrangements around the conversation with our children and the innocent love and playfulness they offer. That includes the reality and force of first-language-nurture culture, authentic attachment, elemental bonding, and sharing awareness between individual voices. Children still count as the focus of meaning for all classes, largely a nihilism-free zone. The imperative to nurture children ties people to stability in production and consumption, but not to any particular ideology or metaphysical assumptions.

Social Order

Hobbes failed to recognize or imagine that there is another common experience of human interconnectedness, namely from within the culture of intense personal engagement with newborns, infants, and toddlers for the project of initiating them into the connection of intelligences through language, shared culture, caring, and nurture generally. From that alternative ‘state of nature’ the interconnectedness develops without a social contract or a law-giver from above. The fact that women carry on with their nurture culture is what actually accounts for the stability of human interconnectedness. The guarantor and binding mechanism of social order and human communication networks is not the sovereign authority of the star-system meritocracy, nor its police forces, armies, guns, or prisons. Sovereignty is not the source of social stability. Social order and interconnectedness are products of the informal non-family collectives which groups of mothers form with their children to have the children play together and learn to speak the communal language. Such groups tend to ignore family separations and instead create informal collectives pragmatically with any willing mothers in the vicinity. They build on and extend accomplishments from the countless hours that mothers spend engaged with their children, face to face, voice to voice, enjoying the elemental pleasure and mutual inspiration that particular intelligences experience in connecting with each other.

Nurture and War

The extended nexus of first-language acquisition is in some ways a conservative force since stability is necessary for nurturing children. However, it doesn’t value wars, gambling, or radical inequality, some of the worst plagues on humanity, which are treasured by the alpha-structure. Nurture culture has an intrinsic tendency toward promoting equality because it is common knowledge within that culture that huge investments of loving care, personal attachment, energy, strategy, and work go into the survival and linguistic engagement of every human being, and it is bestial and criminal to waste any single one. The main reason to avoid violence is that violence disrespects not only its victims but all the sacred investment of nurture that supported their survival. First-language-nurture groups create the interconnectedness in the first place and work on it day in and day out, so when the interconnectedness is poisoned there is bound to be some alienation and rage among people working to keep it vital. It adds another layer to the rage and alienation from having the work and persons of females disrespected almost universally, a situation that is made difficult to correct because of the immediate demands of nurturing work. The point is not that women are uniquely able or impelled to nurture, but that a fundamental sociability in human spirituality is revealed in nurturing activity, that such widespread devotion reveals the depth of sociability in human spirituality generally. There is no justification here or anywhere for the ghettoization of nurture or of women’s choice of work.

Dominance Culture

The alpha-structure devises an economic and political agenda so that wars can still be fought, transferrable wealth funnelled upward and concentrated, the gambling addiction of the finance industry celebrated, money from corporate crime laundered, and the privileges and pleasures of unlimited wealth can be undisturbed. It accepts that the commonality of people are more usable, compliant, obedient, and manageable when kept in a vulnerable psychological state and guided within certain boundaries of experience. The alpha-structure craves the macro-parasitic fruits of economic and political control, and psychological manipulation is simply an essential aspect of that control. Part of that is a requirement to trivialize and denigrate the vital importance of the first-language-nurture culture which is actually the source of stability in the human interconnectedness. The core ethos of the alpha-trophy faction is full-spectrum dominance and the elimination of competition from alternative visions, by kinetic violence if necessary. It is not possible for people high on that Kool-Aid to do anything other than ridicule any generalization of the value of nurture. Under dominance culture, the political marginalization of the first-language-nurture culture is so extreme that the arrival of a continuous stream of new persons, linguistically and socially equipped and competent, is passed over as an event of brute nature, a given like minerals in the ground. Women doing the work of building fundamental attachments among separate intelligences are discounted as fauna, operating under biological compulsions, “maternal instinct”.

Scribal Culture

Just as the nurture of children (and community) by mothers reveals an aspect of humanity beyond the conception and comfort zone of social theories like Hobbes’, the same is true of the personal experience of, and a certain chain of political interventions by, literary culture. Even though literary arts were and are sponsored and exploited by alpha-families and religious cults as supports for intimidating dominance, the mental life of a literate person acquaints him or her with private experience of a certain freedom and self-possession. The gift of scribal culture is enrichment of personal interiority, an elaborate interior identity, direct acquaintance with ideality as secular spirituality. Individuals are gratified by such personally interior processes as questioning and creative reconceptualization and by expressing that creativity in a distinctive voice. (Personal orientation is not a structure of symbols, but rather an interior spiritual bearing of intervention within brute actuality.) The mental life of literacy occasioned a kind of thinking that came to be called “rational”, willing to evaluate different sides of an argument with no limit on time since propositions exist in objective form for any reader consider. The cultural stream of reading and writing, abstract thinking and study, critique, and interpretation, more than either of the others highlights a depth of creativity and freedom at the level of the individual, the literary voice as distinct from the social voice. It elaborated a spiritual world of ideas as a vast context for strict concreteness.

Proof of the innovative political force of literary culture is in the pudding of history. For example, essential to the European Renaissance was the confrontation of Christendom with long-gone ancient pagan culture, based on the re-discovery of ancient texts and works of art, and a re-evaluation of pagan culture to acknowledge its general superiority. The context for development of European education at that crucial stage was an urgency to benefit from the previous culture which had produced inspiring people, with inspiring literary voices and thoughts. (It wasn’t about concrete economic pragmatism.) A crucial piece of what excited Renaissance Europeans was pagan humanist individualism (Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism), an excitement that launched a philosophical de-stabilization of the Christian ideology around the spirituality and destiny of the human individual. There was also a technological innovation, the printing press, which accelerated the pre-existing movement for universal literacy. The great western spiral of revolt that started in the time of John Wycliffe (1331-1384) and the Oxford Lollards was associated with Wycliffe’s movement to promote proletarian literacy in vernacular languages, especially by translation of the Bible, a clear case of political intervention by the scribal culture stream. The Church of Rome was strongly against unauthorized Bible reading. Subsequent Protestant piety required universal literacy in vernacular languages so every individual could read and interpret holy scripture, an accomplishment that conferred on every individual a new kind of spiritual dignity.

Throughout the earlier medieval period, aristocracy had been a kind of junior partner to the Church in the sovereign supervision of Christendom, but the Renaissance involved an assertion of independence by aristocracy and monarchy. Church, monarchy, and aristocracy were the overt structures of sovereign power, institutions of the alpha-trophy culture of dominance. However, the Renaissance also featured a momentous, if less conspicuous, cultural movement, namely a sharp increase in the prestige of literacy, bookishness, and scholarly contemplative culture (including philosophy) which become an alternative model of virtue and accomplishment, a way to authority and accomplishment also available, even then, to some women. Qualities respected in aristocratic culture were distinctly masculine, military, and formally social, quite different from qualities cultivated by scholarship. It was around those historical events that the operators of dominance culture came to recognize the anarchic impulse intrinsic to the culture of ideality and thinking. Academic freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of thought, freedom of the press, have all been hotly contested political issues, as the recurring theme of book-burning illustrates. Censorship and the banning of books have been common acts of dominance culture. Universal literacy and education enabled a new kind of individualism, a kind established by personally interior cultivation and not in combat over scarce trophies. Entrepreneurship in literary culture eventually constructed the Republic of Letters outside the control of institutions, enabling the Enlightenment and new ideas of human rights and freedoms. Descartes’ declaration: “I am thinking, so I must exist!” truly expresses the potential of modern subjective individualism, a kind of individualism that manifests in the creative authenticity of utterance, of a voice that engages in conversation, instead of in hoards of concrete possessions. The republic of letters is a forum for multitudes of distinctive literary voices.

So, What is Patriarchy?

Patriarchy is the political and economic institutionalization, in the structure of social relationships within a state, of dominance culture at the expense of the appropriate influence and recognition of both nurture culture and the literary culture of ideality. Patriarchy is immersion in the metaphysical ideology of dominance culture, the conviction that social order depends on an edifice of control, power, hierarchy, force, supervision, rules, and contracts. This nearly exclusive institutionalization of the dominance culture is sanctified by a simplified (materialist-friendly) metaphysics of human nature, the Hobbesian view of human ego-gratification, comfortably incorporating a modernized version of the Christian dogma of original sin which asserts that individuals benefit from a system of domination, and that domination is pre-determined by God or nature. Such a competitive materialist view of human nature, the socially pragmatic view, is patriarchal ideology pure and simple, asserting a false metaphysics and a false conception of spirituality. Patriarchal ideology has convinced everybody that some sort of “…archy” is needed to keep us missiles of atomized egoism in check, but neither of the two alternative culture streams tends toward formation of any kind of “…archy”, and that is their strength. They each tend toward strong but less brittle interconnectedness, in fact, anarchic interconnectedness.

Notes

Tensions among the three cultures identified here can be recognized in the essay:

Ur-Fascism, by Umberto Eco, published by The New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995 issue. (A link to this essay was posted on Episyllogism Blog, WordPress, August 11, 2016.) Based on his experience growing up under fascism in Italy in the 1930’s, Eco presents core characteristics of fascism.

Some points in this posting were introduced previously:

Posting 9, October 25, 2011, Political Considerations

Posting 35, July 6, 2012, Transcendental Humanism

Posting 36, July 12, 2012, First Language Nurture

Posting 37, July 26, 2012, Sharing Awareness

Anarchist vs Libertarian

22 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Political Power, Subjectivity

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anarchism, capitalism, competitive materialism, creativity, freedom, individualism, libertarianism, meritocracy, Power, property rights, spirituality

Varieties of Individualism

Tags: spirituality, individualism, freedom, power, anarchism, creativity, competitive materialism, property rights, meritocracy, libertarianism, capitalism

There are two conflicting concepts of individualism, one with a material focus called libertarianism, and the other with a spiritual focus called anarchism. The spiritualist orientation conceives the individual as a gusher of inventive creativity, a fountain from which good things flow. On this view, power is not something that originates from the barrel of a gun, nor is it created by institutional customs and habits of stratification, authority, and subordination. Power originates in the creative freedom of individual spirituality. Emphasis on this spirituality creates a picture in which you want as much originality and sharing as possible, and the best political system is one which enables and enhances that power at the individual level. Tapping into the personally interior gusher of spirituality (intelligence), and bringing spontaneous creations into the world from personal interiority is identified as the way to fulfillment for both individuals and human collectives.

Spirituality, Sociability, Interconnectedness, Equality

Anarchism is an assertion of individual autonomy founded on a vision of human equality. It comes from a history of anti-oppression, and grows organically from the radical enlightenment in European history. Anarchism does not denigrate the importance of human interconnectedness, but makes an effort to remove injustice and top-down human-on-human macro-parasitism from relationships. It is espoused mainly by people who have little property and who live with a history of top-down authoritarian oppression. Anarchism is an assertion of autonomy as a counterforce to lethal violence from historically entrenched factions practicing exploitative repression in the name of some supposedly sovereign community or transcendent civilization.

Competitive Materialism

In the contrasting, and far more common, materialist orientation the individual is conceived as a hollow pit, a kind of black hole, which inherently strives to fill itself by sucking in, taking possession of, and consuming as much as possible of the goods from its environment. Such activity inevitably brings it into conflict with the other black holes in its vicinity. The sucking and the conflict determine the essential character of human existence on the competitive materialist view, which is the matrix of American libertarianism. Libertarians embrace the myth of the free market: competitive self-interest as fundamental and unalterable human nature. On this materialist interpretation of individualism, life is pervasively and inescapably competitive because human nature glimpses fulfillment only by continuous consumption and by winning the conflicts necessary to take the most desirable consumables. Competitions inevitably produce inequality, hierarchy, subordination, and macro-parasitism. The concept “meritocracy” reveals how apparent individualism is meant to morph into an institutionalized power structure, a mechanism of top-down supervision and control. People who win a lot of trophies for themselves are somehow supposed to have shown by that activity that others should be subordinate to them. It is a short slide from libertarianism to fascism.

Given its conception of human nature and motivation, the worldview of American-style libertarians is focused on property rights and ownership of property. The libertarian stance is a declaration of self-identification in terms of trophy-properties and the personal determination to exercise with jealous possessiveness any and all advantages that arise from ownership of property and wealth. It is a rejection of any empathic (ethical) impulse to bond and share, especially with people of colour, again expressing a stratified conception of human relations which is perfectly compatible with racism and xenophobia. This competitive materialism of capitalist free-market libertarianism is a vision of human inequality as essentially good (matrix of magnificent accumulators and their spectacular accumulations), generally espoused by persons who expect to be among those who have plenty. However, embedded in this conception is also an urgent justification for human nature to be controlled because, as an aggressively competitive sucking pit, it is innately unstable and de-stabilizing for social relationships. Since no person is actually viable in complete isolation, even a libertarian expects to have some enduring human relationships. As an expression of political conservatism, the expected relationships of libertarians are hardly matters of speculation, they will be hierarchical and privileging to the masculine as traditionally conceived in the alpha-trophy-looting culture of masculinity.

What makes the possession of property so vital is that it enables living from ownership rather than from labour, which is to say, it enables living on the labour of others. The normal picture of libertarian autonomy assumes ownership of sufficient property to support a profound self-sufficiency. Only a scant few can ever really have such a concentration of resources. Libertarian assumptions are an idealized and sanitized nostalgia for the autonomy of medieval crime family estate owners. Because of that materialist value focus, libertarians are not, and can never be, against strong government (in spite of claims to the contrary). It was those antique medieval versions of libertarians, people dedicated to the strategy of living from property ownership rather than from labour, who conceived and established sovereign governments in the first place, even though they also kept private armies. Owners of property always want the most powerful protection possible against any risk of losing their property, which means they depend on the machinery of armed violence in the form of personal weapons, police, and military organizations, as much of it as can be arranged. Protection of property absolutely requires the “right hand” of sovereign government, the power that comes from the barrel of a gun: armed forces, spies, assassins, and a sovereign who represents property owners, as traditional sovereigns always do. Such sovereignty implies the whole apparatus of class macro-parasitism, and a general culture of top-down orientation, the mass subordination to sovereign power. The propertied minority did not seriously want to restrict sovereign power until governments began to be influenced by people who make a living by labour. Conservative emphasis on the limitation of government became prominent when sovereign governments became, to some extent, an expression of popular choice, chosen by elections with broad enfranchisement.

The Romantic Idealism of Conservative Morality

When individual spirituality is defined as inherently competitive then empathy is ruled out as the basis of morality, since it would always be overridden by anti-other impulses. Without empathy, morality has to be based on the primacy and enforcement of top-down commandments, rules, edicts, proclamations, sometimes presented as metaphysical principles. Right-wing morality is conceived as obedience to a proclaimed list of such virtues and duties: the code of honour, hard work, and self-reliance. (Accepting charity is a moral failing on that view.) Normally, conservative ideology ridicules idealism and conflates it with romanticism as unrealistic and impractical, a cowardly evasion of realism. However, nothing is more romantic and idealistic than promoting authoritarian society based on the ideal of the masculine hero, combined with the idealism of metaphysical virtues and duties. If social arrangements are not constructed on the basis of empathy then they have to be based on enforcement of such metaphysics, and supposing that anyone is qualified to police the commandments requires pure romantic hero romanticism.

Although the purest form of American libertarianism is officially rejected by political parties in the ideological ‘centre’ during election campaigns, some degree of this attitude pervades American culture and capitalist culture generally, so when people like Barack Obama, George Bush, or Ronald Reagan (Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, or David Cameron in the UK), use the word “freedom”, they don’t mean anarchism, they mean the freedom of people with great accumulations to do whatever they like with the vast majority of that wealth, no matter how much publicly created goods such as roads, general literacy, and norms of civility and security of person have contributed to the possibility and production of that wealth. They mean American libertarianism, a freedom for the investor class. That’s all that freedom can mean in capitalism. Other than in anarchism, the political left has no coherent model of an alternative to capitalism nor a philosophically bottom-up or horizontal system of reality, and so, no conception of how to advance beyond capitalism.

Recommended source on anarchism:

The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936, written by Murray Bookchin, published by AK Press (1998), ISBN 1-873176-04-X.

Romantic Idealism and the Mind of God

20 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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1517, 1789, Hegelian idealism, Johann Fichte, Kantian idealism, Martin Luther, Marxism, modernity, nihilism, Platonic idealism, Romantic idealism, Roy Bhaskar, spirituality, The French Revolution, the Kantian revolution, the mind of God, The Thirty Years War, the tragic sense of life

This is Episode 2 of The Tragedy of Romanticism

Tags: Spirituality, Platonic idealism, Hegelian idealism, Marxism, Kantian idealism, the Kantian revolution, Johann Fichte, Romantic idealism, Martin Luther, Roy Bhaskar, the tragic sense of life, nihilism, modernity, The French Revolution, 1789, 1517, the Thirty Years War, the mind of God

Informal Romanticism

The French Revolution of 1789 expressed a primal, informal, romanticism that was an inspiration for the philosophical romanticism that developed soon after. It was a projection outward of subjective aspirations, heroically, against the teeth of practicality and realism as defined by the apparent balance of forces and probable achievements. “This is what we want. I don’t care if dreams cannot come true. This expresses my (spiritual) interiority.” The romantic attitude is the opposite of “practical” and “realistic” as ordinarily used. Plans and proposals that count as practical and realistic always expresses a normative political force. In authoritarian cultures, any kind of change in the organization of wealth, power, or status, is considered unrealistic and impractical, and so romantic. That is core conservative political rhetoric and mind-set. In the conservative lexicon “romantic” means frivolous, trivial, crazy, dangerously destructive. Informal romanticism is an assertion of the power of subjectivity against objective actuality, a willing acceptance of the creative non-actuality of subjectivity, but still asserting its value and power. In addition to privileging subjective non-actuality over brute objective actuality, informal romanticism is also a certain characterization of subjectivity, emphasizing the creative, chaotic, emotionally expressive character of dreams in subjectivity. It doesn’t have to be a denial of the reality of objective actuality, only a categorical rejection of the sovereignty and sufficiency of actuality, a resistance to claims of such a sovereignty. The romantic attitude puts emphasis on the creativity of subjectivity, on subjectivity as lawless and capricious, and so on the removal of subjectivity from the pre-determination of both nature and the normative force of cultural models. (Every individual has normative social conformity requirements in addition to the fall-line of physics to limit the possibilities of overtly manifested creativity.) That removal from pre-determination is here called the spiritual interiority of subjectivity.

There was something wildly terrible, tragic, and beautiful (romantic) about the French Revolution, the doomed efforts of age-long victims of aristocratic macro-parasitism, risking their lives and a marginally viable way of life for a slim hope of justice and dignity. By the time of that revolution, Germans had long ago attempted their revolution in the form of the Protestant Reformation, launched by Martin Luther in 1517, and which eventually brought the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), down on their heads. That history left Germans pretty well intimidated, but still substantially Protestant (in very regulated forms) by 1789. However, it could be argued that the Revolution became necessary in France because the Reformation had been so quickly and brutally repressed in the French Wars of Religion in the second half of the sixteenth century, soon after Luther launched the protestant movement. So, as a continuation of post-Reformation re-thinking of fundamental certainties and possibilities (the Enlightenment movement), the Revolution burst forth, and afterward the reactionary backlash inevitably followed, just as it had against the Reformation.

In yet another historical rebound of cultural forces, philosophical Romanticism was an interpretation of the French Revolution by the German academic, literary, and artistic class, just as the Revolution was a kind of French interpretation of the German Reformation (then more than two centuries in the past). The human interconnectedness is a medium and an echo chamber in which cultural creations get refracted by interpretations from person to person (interiority to interiority) and from group to group. In 1789 Germany was emphatically backward looking in political culture as a legacy of the Thirty Years War. German intellectuals such as Johann Fichte (1762-1814) and the artist known as Novalis (1772-1801) were both excited and repelled by the Revolution because in Germany they were immersed in a neo-medieval ideology of admiration for Christendom and its chivalrous aristocracy, even though they longed for complete freedom of thought at the same time. The young German intellectuals felt the thrill of new freedom but desperately wanted to fit it into the stability of existing (medieval) institutions in Germany. They merely wanted people like themselves to be recognized as meriting membership in the fellowship of the privileged.

Broad Effects of Philosophical Fundamentals

Those historical upheavals and catastrophes are inseparably involved with philosophical fundamentals, and especially philosophical conceptions of idealism, of which romanticism is one particular form. Idealism generally asserts that there is a category of non-actuality which is supra-actual, transcendent, and as such indispensable in any conception of reality. That category is what was described above, in relation to informal romanticism, as the spiritual interiority of subjectivity. Both of the following usages of “ideal” illustrate that special interiority. Certain politicians are described as ‘idealist’ rather than pragmatic. Idealist politicians are aspirational in the sense of striving for something not yet actual, something there is reason to believe would be better, but which might be impossible. Also, there is the sense of idealism in “idealized”, in which things are simplified and imagined in a perfected condition. The “idealized” item is distinct from any actual items, and it is commonly understood that, as such, it is interior to some or other subjectivity as an idea. In articulating the importance of a category of non-actuality, idealism goes “through the looking glass” as far as traditional social structures of all kinds are concerned, and so, much depends on the way idealism is conceived. Idealism is politically explosive because it is an affirmation and embracing of a supra-actuality, something more important than whatever nature, previous history, and the sagacious ancestors have bestowed on the current generation in terms of social norms and ways of seeing the world.

Standard Idealism: Plato and Hegel

The directionality of any human gaze is so laden with what cannot be perceived, with subjective non-actualities such as futurity, aspirations, and lessons learned, (caring, anticipation, evaluation) that it points (in addition to a region of surroundings) in a direction that can only be characterized as personally inward, to an interiority of spiritual non-actuality. Any philosophical idealism is some model of spirituality and a recognition of spirituality as elemental or non-reducible. In other words, idealism is some version of absolute recognition of the special interiority of intelligences. Recognizing the special non-actuality of spiritual interiority gives any position an aspect of idealism. A strong idealism asserts that the most fundamental character of the cosmos is intelligence or spirituality.

Romanticism is a kind of idealism, but not the only kind. For example, Plato’s idealism is quite different, and Platonic idealism has been the most influential by far, having established from ancient times a dominance in the European system of cultural reality that still has considerable force. Plato’s Ideal Forms are profoundly stable, eternal, removed from the space/ time and materiality of the mundane world, and so automatically associated with (the interiority of) some kind of divine super-intelligence. In Platonism, the Ideal Forms occupy a position near the top of a metaphysical hierarchy, a structure of descent from a divine One-ness at the highest level of reality down to a churning multiplicity of ephemeral appearances at the level of everyday experience. Their association with intelligence is far removed from ordinary subjectivity and from the capricious personality which some romantics have imagined as divine intelligence. Also, Hegelian idealism has been vastly influential, especially as it lives on in Marxism, in spite of the declared materialism of Marxism (dialectical materialism). The historical effects of Marxism are yet more consequences of the mutating conceptions of idealism. Hegel’s is clearly a mutation of Platonic idealism, a vision of cosmic history as the striving of all-encompassing universal Being toward full reality and self-recognition as Ideal Form. Hegel retains the Platonic metaphysical structure (including levels of reality not unlike those in Roy Bhaskar’s Critical Realism), but in Hegelian idealism the universal Being starts from the bottom and is striving up the “chain of ascent” to the divine One-ness at the final and highest stage of reality.

The Kantian Revolution against Platonism

Then there is the kind of idealism which occasioned philosophical romanticism, namely Kantian idealism, which maps out the necessity of personal spiritual activity in the construction of ordinary knowledge of the world, of every individual’s orientation in the world. Kantian idealism is the most personal and subjective of the philosophical visions of spirituality, especially as tweaked by Fichte. Fichte’s early work, in which he first rejects Kant’s idea of “thing-in-itself” and develops the idea of the individual subjective “I” which must posit its entire world, is the clearest alternative to top-down visions of the cosmos in the whole history of philosophy. Fichte’s vision is a re-orientation or re-conceptualization of reality as a whole, situating individual intelligence at the creative source. Such a re-orientation was implicit in Luther’s “leap of faith”, but was not fully articulated before Kant and Fichte, and there could have been no Fichte without Kant. Romantic idealism was clearly a development from Kantian idealism, although hardly a straightforward one.

Although Kant did describe his work as “a Copernican Revolution” in philosophy, it is not clear that he recognized the full bottom-up social and political implications of his personalized idealism. Kant was a social and political moderate-conservative, and as a university professor employed by the state, his livelihood depended on being seen as a supporter of the status quo, more or less. However, the spiritual entity who is the subject having experiences in Kant’s vision is self-legislating and so has no need for the Church, aristocracy, or any other social authority. Personal spirituality for Kant is almost monadic, clearly influenced by Leibniz in that way but completely free of Leibniz’s totalitarian predetermination. Kant’s personally interior idealism would logically lead to an equality of individuals based on autonomous spirituality, and so it implicitly discredited the whole social edifice of aristocracy and the hierarchy of Christendom. That qualifies Kant’s idealism as an extension of the European revolutionary movement into the matrix of ideas. That is the Kantian revolution, although it is doubtful that the early romantic philosophers understood it in that way. Nevertheless, the response in Romanticism was something altogether shocking: a declaration that philosophy as an activity should be abandoned completely and replaced by art; a call to forsake philosophical thinking, the better to seek immersion in poetry, music, stories, and images. That is why romanticism is more prominent as a literary and artistic movement than as a philosophical system. Something in their interpretation of Kantian idealism brought the romantic philosophers face to face with a vision of human tragedy from which they recoiled. The tragedy does not arise from Kantian idealism or Fichte’s absolute I. Those are not tragic visions.

The Tragedy of Romanticism

Radical French philosophers had made an attempt to construct a Plato-busting bottom-up metaphysics with their materialism (in the footsteps of ancient Epicureans), after the suppression of the reformation in France, and it had been remarkably effective up to a point, but it was not sustainable. Materialism and freedom are mutually exclusive. It was Kant’s elaboration of Luther’s idea of spiritual freedom which really accomplished (on the second attempt, so to speak) the bottom-up metaphysics. Kant’s idealism is clearly set at the level of the ordinary individual person because it is in continuous engagement with brute actualities of the ambient world within which the spirituality finds itself, entangled with effects of the “thing-in-itself”. However, the early romantics encountered Kantian idealism in their studies as Fichte’s philosophy students, and so really encountered Fichte’s interpretation of Kant, and they never took it seriously enough as a description of normal individual intelligence or spirituality with broad implications for empathy, sociability, and politics. Romantic philosophers lived in a very hierarchical culture and age. They would have taken value strata among human beings as self-evident givens. The grip of their top-down orientation was so strong that they couldn’t conceive the absence of hierarchy. So, they came to understand Fichte’s absolute “I” (so much more monadic than Kant’s because of the absence of a countervailing thing-in-itself) as a portrait of divine mind, the mind of God. Certainly it could be argued that the main effect of Fichte’s dismissal of the thing-in-itself was exactly to make his conception of spirituality less human and essentially divine.

As a vision of the divine mind, there was profound novelty about Fichte’s “absolute ego” as compared to the God of Abraham, of Maimonides, or even the purely rational God conceived by Leibniz (much closer to Fichte in cultural tradition). The Abrahamic God is bound and limited by goodness and by love for his creatures. However, the philosophy students who were on their way to developing the romantic vision, could not help but see Fichte’s divine subjectivity through the lens of their experience of the French Revolution, an intensely violent uprising completely justified by the stark contrast between the lives of the privileged in European society and the lives of the drudgery classes, gross institutionalized injustices, any change to which threatened the entire social order of their world. In that light, it was impossible to hold onto the idea of divinity limited by goodness. To the romantics, Fichte’s divine mind is absolute monadic creativity, an artist god, with no responsibility to any other and not bound or limited by anything. Fichte’s absolute ego, in its romantic interpretation, was not the slightest bit interested in morality or orderly civil society, and was nothing like perfectly rational as Leibniz’s God was. He issued no demands to humans for obedience, reverence, or worship, but also offered nothing to balance human suffering, no eternal reward, no redemption from guilt. Instead, he was a playful artist creating drama, emotional upheaval, and shocking beauty. In many ways, this was an historically novel concept, including a form of creativity that was broadly applicable to individual humans. With the absolute ego from Fichte, the emphasis is more on creativity than on command, control, reward, or punishment, and that removes some emphasis from command and control generally even in worldly social and political situations. It also recognizes creativity as the core of subjectivity. Fundamentally, it was gender neutral in conception, although in style and application it was full of male bias.

For Romantics, then, there is a single immaterial spirit with a personality and mental life quite similar to a human’s but with infinitely more power. The Romantic deity is an artist. This spirit has dreams, it indulges itself in daydreaming, and those dreams are the world that humans inhabit, ourselves being dream-things in those dreams. Whimsically, he picks certain people to be his prophets, and grants favours and inspiration to certain heroes and artists, like the gods of ancient Greece were supposed to do. Every landscape is an inner landscape for romantics, pervaded with dream code-work, disguises, and multi-layered associations, unrestricted by cultural norms or by the laws of physics. With the inner landscape, things display (obliquely) their emotional meaning in their appearance, as things do in dreams. What romantics saw in this new idealism was the artist God who toys with the world, and with the humans in the world, without any interest in justice or redemption, as proven by the spectacle of the Revolution and the light it shed on social organization and the force of history.

This conception of the divine mind meant that the Christian religion as traditionally constituted, with pledges of eternal reward and redemption, upon which the stability of the European social hierarchy and culture depended, was a lie. Earthly suffering has no meaning other than the whimsical amusement of an omnipotent daydreamer. Romantics saw the political enforcement of Christendom as a version of Plato’s “noble lie” (Republic), and they accepted the necessity of using that lie to preserve the organization of society, so that some small minority at least could devote themselves to beauty and ideal things, supporting and enjoying the arts, the work of artists, for their own immersion in transcendent beauty. The human artist became the example of the optimal, godlike, human being. However, the romantics also felt tragedy in the need to lie to repress the vain aspirations of the vast majority, in a world so made as to depend on such a lie. Privileged people don’t want social justice and can’t want it because for them the age-old forms of injustice are the price that must be paid so that some few (themselves) can live the higher life of refinement, beauty, and ideal things, a milieu enabling such contemplations as math and science, but above all artistic beauty, as close as possible to the life of the high God and as such the authentic heartbeat of their civilization.

On that worldview, we humans are dreamed just enough in God’s image to think sometimes that we have freedom and power to achieve justice, but that thought is an illusion, and so the human situation is fundamentally tragic. The immediate form of our tragedy is the squalid institutions of unalterable human inequality. We must either accept being deceived by the dirtiest of lies or else be parties to proclaiming that lie, and the problem with philosophy is that its history has brought it to the point of exposing the deception and undermining the civilization of the champions of beauty. For romantics, the only real power we have is to dream, to create our interior non-actualities. That is the romantic vision of transcendence available to humans, and they take it as our shield against glimpsing the ugliness of the broader human situation. The romantic idea of the deity is an emphatic confirmation that the social oppression they witnessed was so entrenched as to appear metaphysically decreed.

Romantic idealism, then, is yet another top-down vision of divine spirituality, a mutation of Platonism into a more modern idiom. The real implication of Kantian idealism was completely different, a sort of re-distribution of spiritual creativity and power down from on-high and into the multiplicity of agents engaging in ordinary experience. The romantic vision of tragedy arises by removing spiritual agency from every individual and ascribing it instead to a universal deity, imposing a completely inappropriate top-down orientation on Kant’s vision of interior spirituality. In doing that, philosophical romanticism seems to glorify subjectivity, but in fact trivializes it. The romantic call to leave philosophy and turn to art and culture is profoundly political and strictly conservative. Their nihilism was the angst of the unjustly privileged, an awareness of the stark and pointless contrast between their lives and the lives of the drudgery class.

The Tragic Sense of Life

We are still living with legacies of romantic idealism, for example in the commonplace declaration that “stories are all we have”. The conclusion and fulfillment of that philosophical Romanticism is a resolve to abandon thinking that goes beyond stories and instead to concentrate on moments of subjective ecstasy or rapture in the altered states inspired by poetry, tragic drama, music, and stories of magic, wonders, and heroes. “Since actuality is ugly, depressing, and utterly beyond our control, let’s achieve the transcendence of personal tranquility and joy by listening to awesome music, contemplating beautiful images, or absorbing our minds in narratives of heroism and nobility.” The romantic “elevation” of ideal things is completely idle, and the narrative sparkle and flash of tragic heroes, witches, wizards, demons, exotic locations, high drama, violent conflict, glory in battle, dangerous rescues, lost causes, fatal flaws, futile but beautiful gestures, narrative suspense and satisfying resolutions, are all merely hiding romantic nihilism. That turn of romanticism is very much like mysticism, which embraces the trances and altered states of consciousness resulting from sensory deprivation, drugs, or mortification of the flesh as if they were higher states of being.

Philosophy as Critique of Orientation Within Systems of Reality

15 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Embodiment, Equality, Hierarchy, Narrative, Political Power, Subjectivity

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cosmic personification, critique, intelligence, nature, non-actuality, philosophy, science, systems of reality, the cultural orientation grid, the supernatural, time

Certain givens of nature are crucial for any individual’s orientation in the world: gravity, solidity, the spectrum of electro-magnetic radiation, chemical transfers of energy. The givens of nature are modelled and measured by science. Culture is just as important for orientation: language, technology, economic infrastructure, and institutions. If you approach everything as culture (emerging from biology in some way) then probably you are an anthropologist or sociologist, working to perfect an account of the scientific determinism of human behaviour. You might also be philosophically postmodern, approaching everything as “text”. With some exceptions such as that, to think philosophically is to recognize that personal or subjective non-actualities are also crucial in any individual’s orientation, and that culture and the brute actuality of nature are constructed within a creative orientation which is interior to individual intelligences. Human life is played out by individuals in an encounter between the non-actualities of personal subjectivity and the brute actualities of objective nature. That we are also sponges of culture reveals how much enlargement of intelligence or enrichment of orientation we experience from interconnection with others and their orientations. Culture also constitutes a crucial problem for individuals because it has been tainted by longstanding efforts to legitimize and even sanctify human-on-human macro-parasitism.

The Supernatural in Systems of Reality

In claiming that official systems of reality consist of conceptual constructs of nature, community, and individual subjectivity (in posting 79, January 15, 2015, Two Lessons from History: Mutable Reality), it was not helpful that the supernatural went unmentioned. The supernatural is normally given far more emphasis and cultural elaboration than nature, and both nature and culture are often approached as encrypted messages from and about the supernatural. What is crucial, however, is that there is always a special connection between what is supernatural and individual subjectivity, often jointly conceptualized as “spirit”. That special connection is present because the whole idea of the supernatural originates in the experience of ordinary subjectivity: personal intelligence and the intelligences of other ordinary people. Caring, for example, is always and only interior to intelligences. Ethics and ethical judgements, identifications of justice and injustice, are always and only acts of intelligence. It is the same with ideas, abstractions, generalities, and categories. Teleological time, plans for the future, hopes or fears of a certain future, aspirations and intentions to create a certain future and to play among alternative plausible futures, are always and only interior to individual intelligences. Each individual constructs a pluralistic teleology, temporal bearings out of a past and toward an array of increasingly improbable futures, all non-actualities, which is to say, separate from the brute actuality of nature. Time is the miracle of intelligence because it is the matrix of freedom in its non-actuality. Caring, judgments of ethics or justice, and teleological time are all interior to ordinary intelligences. In spite of the fact that everyone’s direct and original acquaintance with those features of experience is in ordinary people, such features still have a supernatural quality. They express novelty and initiative (being alive) instead of merely inertia. Ordinary intelligence, then, is the primary supernatural, and that is why all ideas of the supernatural are ideas about intelligences or features of intelligence.

Whenever these interior features of intelligences are ascribed to the world at large, to nature, or to disembodied entities of any sort, they are inappropriate projections of what can only be interior to an ordinary person’s intelligence. As such, they are distortions of reality, fables, and deceptions that have disabling effects since they falsely personalize or personify nature, transforming nature into a super-person and infusing the whole arrangement with an overriding and centralized moral purpose and caring that cannot be there. Personalizing nature in that way subordinates individual subjectivity within a top-down structure, and trivializes individual subjectivity catastrophically in comparison with some fabulous (false) super-person. It is crucial for intelligence to be present in any model of fundamental reality, but it is just as important that the force of intelligence be correctly located in ordinary individuals.

Intelligence, and so what is supernatural, has generally been erroneously located and attributed. The main error has been in imagining that the intelligence or spirit that is experienced in ordinary people was placed there somehow by a vaster and ‘higher’ intelligence, some grander version of, or entity of, intelligence. Jumping to that conclusion plausibly follows from all the experiences we have of ‘things’ descending from the sky into our local situation. For example, rain arrives from the sky and washes the countryside and streets of the city. It waters thirsty grass, trees, and crops. Later the sun comes out from the clouds and warms the entire face of the earth with its powerful light, and the plants reach up to it. Our immediate survival depends on our eating, drinking, and breathing local bits of that vast environment which is vivified from above. Such experiences arrive in the context of the overwhelming and awesome vista of the starry night sky as seen from our position as embodied individuals, effectively rooted or tethered to solid ground, emphatically located, local, limited, and small compared with the world around us which is apparently endless; and also in the context of our childhood conditioning to having and depending on parental seniority presenting us gifts from the accumulated aids to orientation of a mysterious ambient culture. We are persuaded to imagine top-down models of cosmic reality by this whole awesome vista in which we can seem to be passive receivers.

However, in the case of intelligence, that pattern of remote origination, of fertility, is inappropriate and in fact pernicious. As soon as you posit an original higher intelligence, then it follows that everything that exists is a product of the plans, judgements, intentions, and caring of that higher intelligence. Nature becomes personified as the voice or expression of the higher intelligence, and not only nature but culture as well. The social order and the distribution of power and property all become expressions of the super-intelligence, and as such, sacred and unquestionable. In that context, any imperfections, flaws, or problems have to be attributed to human nature (or flawed co-gods) as a meagre imitation of the super-intelligence, and such a claim has often been used as both a license and an excuse for heinous brutality. However, nothing other than experiences such as rain and the beauty of the Milky Way indicates a remote origin for ordinary intelligence, and such experiences are unconvincing and inapplicable for this purpose. The intelligence of ordinary individuals does not originate from some grander, vaster, version of itself, but rather, each is autonomous in every person, and there is no grander version of intelligence anywhere. And yet, intelligence is still supernatural in every instance. (The imaginative projection of intelligence onto inanimate nature is a testament to the creative power of ordinary intelligences to invent non-actualities.) Ours isn’t the sort of supernatural which magically overrides and negates certain givens of nature, and yet, where nature is restricted to brute actualities, intelligences clearly dream or fountain up multitudes of non-actualities, and then live from them with variable degrees of success.

Re-Conceptualizing Systems of Reality

The mistake of projecting intelligence into the sky, out onto the cosmos at large, has catastrophic consequences by creating a conceptual niche for macro-parasite factions of humans, and those factions have developed pervasive official cultures to exploit that top-down structure. Re-conceptualizing reality is very largely a matter of replacing that longstanding top-down structure, which depends on personifying nature, with a bottom-up structure. In this revised conception of reality, the supernatural is identical with individual subjectivity. When the moral purpose and caring have been purged from the brute actuality of nature and correctly attributed to individual persons, there are consequences for social structure, politics, and economics, since we get beyond the imaginary imprimatur of God or nature on social and political inequality. On this bottom-up perspective, all individual intelligences are supernatural and fundamentally autonomous in their encounter with the givens of nature. The human landscape now becomes more equal and non-hierarchical, not structured as a Great Chain of Being conceived as a chain of command and subordination. However, that we are sponges of culture still reveals how much enlargement of intelligence or enrichment of orientation we can experience from interconnection with others.

Thinking Off-Grid and Leaving the Matrix

Carrying on within the top-down orientation that is massively supported by the ambient culture could be described as “living on the grid”, or “thinking on the grid”. It doesn’t matter if you have a bank account and subscribe to municipal utilities and electronic service networks. Those grids do impose certain limitations and a degree of predictability on an individual’s behaviour, but in terms of a personal orientation which internalizes mechanisms by which external manipulations operate, the great chain of cosmic command is the grid to keep in mind, because it is a cultural matrix in which we project noble motives upward onto the existence of authority instead of recognizing the otherwise obvious motive of macro-parasitism. Anyone with such an orientation can be carried along by culturally crafted voices and image streams claiming authority, spinning out emotional tides through mass corporate media, for example, dramas of mythical collectives such as nation, race, religion, language tribe, class, profession, or economic niche, full of conflicts and crises, the pageantry of nobility and villainy. One of the main incentives and rewards of macro-parasitism is the feeling of (false) grandeur and superiority expressed in and supported by pervasive and elaborate cultural pageantry of inequality and hierarchy. The consumption and luxury of capitalism is all pageantry supporting the illusion of exceptionalism and superiority. Off-grid, what is supernatural is all on the same level, the level of ordinary embodied intelligences, bringing the identification of the supernatural back to its origins and rejecting the unjustifiable fables it has inspired. Off-grid, it is no longer necessary to sanitize the motives and intentions behind the very existence of power and authority. It is possible to replace all the false drama and hierarchy with the project of expressing a personal creative process and cultivating mutually supportive interconnection among equal intelligences. Off-grid the human world is flat but at the same time multiply supernatural and as such unpredictably creative, even though the culture we have inherited from our murky history and which binds us to that history still remains a massive toxic force to be managed.

Note

For an introduction to macro-parasitism see:

Plagues and Peoples, written by William H. McNeill, Published by Anchor (1977), ISBN-10: 0385121229, ISBN-13: 978-0385121224.

Sovereignty and the Myth of Human Nature

20 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Nature

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anarchism, culture, freedom, law, left-wing politics, sovereignty, the great chain of being, Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) described his imagined ‘state of nature’ as a vicious anarchy that was a continuous war of all against all, and Hobbes’ vision has become the default or common idea of anarchism. Hobbes did not recognize that the humans of his vision, who behave as missiles of (aggressive) self-gratification, are under the influence of a certain culture, a culture of human macro-parasitism perfected by nomadic animal herders in very ancient times and soon enough transferred to conquered human communities. A suitable name for that macro-parasitic culture would be ‘Aryan masculinity’ from the most famous historical group of conquering herders out of the great Eurasian steppes (‘Aryan(s)’ means ‘lord(s)’*). When there are lords, or better, barons, expressing the culture of Aryan masculinity there are always human livestock, underling workers forced into servitude to the barons. Since that is a culture and not a racial trait (nor inherent to human nature), the practitioners are long past being visibly Aryan or anything else in particular. The cultural poisoning from Aryan masculinity ( “to the victor belong the spoils”, glorification of living from top-down human-on-human macro-parasitism) is even now pervasive and normalized, and was so already in Hobbes’ time, which accounts for his (and the previous Christian) view of human nature. The war of all against all is the concept of ‘anarchy’ from within the cultural matrix of Aryan masculinity. If the human population consisted entirely of Aryan-cultured males, each expressing his alpha-trophy-looting will-to-power impulses, then indeed the human condition would tend toward a war of all against all.

Law

When the Aryan-cultured barons got around to attempting to limit their own lethality among themselves, they constructed a personified law by making a person into law, a sovereign, constituting the nucleus of a single Aryan superman on a massive collective scale. They did it by designating the most dominant among them as sovereign leader and then all aligning as projections and extensions of that person. The alignment was primarily military, an organization of aggressive violence, with all sovereign operations conceived as variants of the military organization and spirit. The collective beast so created, which Hobbes called Leviathan, a sovereign-owned-and-operated collective (and which we still endure today) is a mammoth replica of the individual Aryan male driven by competitive ambitions, with a brittle pride (honour) quick to take offence at disrespect, insubordinate autonomy, or resistance; its acquisitive appetites engorged by culture to smother universal empathy and nurturing impulses generally. Devotees of the macro-parasitic culture are persuaded to put up with some personal limitations within the social beast Leviathan because each one can participate in the institutional projection of a massive will-to-power and feel himself enlarged by the conquests and sparkly trophies of his sovereign Leviathan, a share of those trophies becoming personal rewards for devoted loyalty. The most commonly recognized form of Leviathan is the sovereign state, originally some form of monarchy, but other forms are common and can include corporations, crime families, and organized religions, as well as less formal cultural associations or communities of ethos such as organized class consciousness.

The father-figure sovereign, as sovereign, was mythologized as a redeeming force, seeming to lift individuals out of their selfishness, but in fact just absorbing them into a larger selfishness. Rejection of that kind of sovereignty, lordship, and hierarchy is the essence of the egalitarian political left-wing, but rejection of Aryan-type or Leviathan sovereignty, in which the body social is an institutionalized Aryan male on a gigantic scale, is not promotion of war of all against all. Instead, it is promotion of a richer understanding of individual creative intelligence, lacking the top-down idea that humans as individuals need to be redeemed or saved by a herder of some kind, inherently in inescapable debt, owing everything to the higher power which was able to herd them (obvious Aryan propaganda).

The Big Lie of the Macro-Parasite Faction

Whenever there is an authoritarian form of society, a chain-of-command society with a top-down structure of power, it is a legacy of the culture of Aryan masculinity which glorifies macro-parasitism. The grand strategy of the macro-parasitic patriarchy is to convince everyone that Aryan masculinity is the inevitable essence of human nature. “Yes, we all contain evil, but we are the same as everybody, just doing what anyone does when they can, because that is human nature. We need a higher power to press us to do somewhat better.” (The real essence of “human nature”, or rather human individuality, is living in time, which is to say, freedom. Culture has the effect of masking the creative freedom of individuals.) As long as the Aryan view of human nature is accepted, then some authoritarian sovereignty, such as the one described by Hobbes, is necessary for the most basic security of person. However, Aryan masculinity is not inevitable human nature, and insisting that it is is the Big Lie, the Big Ignoble Lie, of the macro-parasite faction. Fear of philosophical thinking is built into the culture of that faction because a philosophical ‘phenomenology of innocence’ refutes the lie and enables a more accurate recognition of human individuality. Another way of saying this might be be to say that the strategy of the macro-parasitic faction is to convince everyone that there is a determinate human nature within a determinate Great Chain of Command (Being), whereas a personally conducted phenomenology of innocence reveals freedom.

* Indian Thought and its Development, written by Albert Schweitzer, translated from German by Mrs. Charles E.B. Russell, published by Henry Holt and Company Inc. (1936). See page 20.

Bottom-Up Metaphysics

12 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Embodiment, Strategic thinking, Transcendence

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bottom-up politics, community, creativity, culture, Enlightenment, freedom, history of ideas, individuality, intelligence, nature, philosophy, religion, science, subjectivity

Re-Conceptualizing Individual Intelligence

Modernity is a system of reality which, once again, profoundly misrepresents, undervalues, and under-appreciates individual intelligences simply as such, so the Enlightenment-era campaign to strengthen the dignity and autonomy of individuals (by recognizing our inherent rationality) was not sufficient. In fact, that campaign was undermined by the very materialism it used to get human nature back down to earth from the Christian kingdom of eternity in the sky, to subvert the claims of parasitic Old Regime social supervisors to be the appointed vicars of the God of eternity. History has shown that metaphysical determinism of any kind, including scientific materialism, ultimately justifies everything about the way things are, the entire status quo. The justifiers of top-down human parasitism have figured that out and use it strategically to legitimize their privileged advantages. In the triumph of science, the materialists and determinists have officially won the quarrel of ideas, and now confidently claim all the intellectual high ground, but that has not had the liberating political and social consequences promised by the eighteenth century radical materialists. Quite the reverse. The determinability of the human machine of scientific fables has inspired the parasite factions to exert utmost effort to control and program human behaviour generally. So yet again, it is necessary to re-conceptualize reality to increase the recognition of power and autonomy in individual embodied intelligences.

All institutional systems of reality that we know of have served the interest of human parasite factions in keeping the majority of people subordinate and vulnerable through distortions of self-identification within a culturally imposed system of reality, often dominated by religion, for example, and as such defining individuals as subordinate to invisible super-beings. Of the ‘three punch combination’ of the Enlightenment, presented in the previous posting (79, January 15, 2015, Two Lessons from History: Mutable Reality), the most important and effective punch was enriching the conceptualization of individual subjectivity by adding rationality to it, increasing the dignity of individuals universally, empowering and enhancing individuals by recognizing their inherent and autonomous intelligence. Crucially, that was not an isolated historical precedent. Martin Luther’s civilization-shaking breakthrough in the sixteenth century was also an empowerment of every individual as able to transcend doubt and uncertainty by taking an interior leap of faith, and in so doing ‘positing’ (to use the expression that Fichte applied to such creative acts) a system of reality, which in Luther’s case was the system of Christian reality. In addition, there is a Stoic background to Luther’s vision, but Luther’s conception of the individual’s power to posit a system of reality goes beyond the Stoic power to assent, or not, to the entire Logos of the world. It is also noteworthy that Luther’s re-conceptualization came in the wake of Wycliffe’s fourteenth century push for vernacular (proletarian) literacy, which was soon supercharged by the spread of printing technology. There is a deep and rich tradition here, an effective philosophical movement to enhance the recognition of individuals in the teeth of dominant cultures which exert every effort to do exactly the opposite. Since enhancing and enriching the understanding of individuality was the most important effort of the Enlightenment, but imperfectly achieved, it remains the most important objective in re-conceptualizing our system of reality.

Re-Thinking Transcendence

Re-conceptualizing our system of reality should begin, this time, by separating intelligences individually off from nature. Although it seems, at first, a difficult thing in our materialist system of reality to separate anything off from nature, it is easy in the case of intelligences because nothing more is needed than the clear distinction between strict actuality and non-actuality. Strict categorical actuality is nature. There are no non-actualities in nature, by definition, and yet there are countless non-actualities in any person’s experience, for example: futurity as a construct of aspirations for peace, pleasure, fun, and love, a construct of hopes and fears. Nature at large contains no non-actualities, and yet non-actualities are crucial features of the orientation or question-bearings of individual intelligences. Teleological time, for example, is a construct of non-actualities: mutually exclusive possibilities and hoped-for resolutions, contradictions and negations, regrets, bearings toward increasingly remote probabilities and ‘long-ago’s, and readiness to seize second chances. All this non-actuality is entirely interior to individual intelligences. Intelligences construct our non-actualities into appropriate anticipations or expectations of what is going to happen now, in the next moment, hour, day, in such a way as to insert into actuality (at considerable metabolic cost) our personally intended futurity of love, energy, dignity, and pleasure. Intelligences transcend nature because, in creating a personal situation out of a play of non-actualities, we use our non-actualities as the matrix of our freedom, something entirely alien to pre-determined nature.

This is an individual intelligence resisting and overcoming the brute particularity of nature by what we call living, building personal expressions, being in a life. Since time as experienced requires an elaborate structure of non-actualities identifiable only in the interior bearings of a personal gaze, consideration of time immediately requires a plunge into the interiority of individual intelligences and as such beyond the conceptual reach of materialism. So, considerations of teleology, time, and freedom, or, uniting all three, intelligences, stand as fatal problems for materialist reductionism. In a world of complete and perfect determinism (perfectly actual particularity) time collapses into a meaningless infinitesimal instant. Only teleological freedom dilates time (interior to particular intelligences) with conceptions of a life’s possibilities, each judged with degrees of improbability and personal costs (embodiment).

Actuality vs Non-Actuality

It is long past time to develop the tradition of enhancing the recognition of individuals universally, and this time it should be done by re-conceptualizing the individual intelligence as the ultimate transcendence in its power to create non-actualities, that is, to create non-actualities that re-configure actuality, to create effective or instrumental non-actualities. The crucial distinction is not between Being and Nothingness (a non-actuality), or between Being and time (another non-actuality), but instead something prior to both, the distinction between actuality and non-actuality. Non-actuality expresses creativity, and as such is not pre-determinable from any actuality. This is the duality that finally breaks the mystical visions of monism, whether materialist or idealist. What is gained from this duality is a recognition of a profound individual freedom, which many people purport to treasure. It is not clear that anything of comparable importance is gained from monism, including the materialist monism of science.

Top-down Systems of Reality

It seems that in the culturally conditioned conceptual pattern of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe it was impossible to separate teleology, freedom, and creativity from the idea of the monotheistic God of the Abrahamic religions, a superhuman divine intelligence. It was impossible to conceive teleology, freedom, and creativity as strictly limited to the scale of individual embodied people, and so localized, limited, plural, and distributed as animal bodies are distributed. Apparently it seemed to the radical philosophers of that time and system of reality that in order to eradicate the superstition of an omnipotent super-parent which effectively legitimized the supremacy of human parasites, it was necessary to abandon transcendence entirely, and so to embrace just nature and total determinism. However, the whole social and political point of their work was an assertion of individual autonomy and freedom of thought, and so, in their determinist materialism, they defeated themselves.

Always, the main barrier to recognizing individual intelligences as autonomous eruptions of transcendent freedom has been the pre-supposition that the powers of intelligences are gifts from some origin greater than the individual: a deity, or a cosmic logos or force of libidinal vitality, or just the pre-determined course of natural law. However, those are all assumptions mandated culturally by an overall top-down structure in systems of reality, and a critical re-thinking of experience reveals that individual intelligences are, in our interiority of non-actualities, independent and autonomous sources of creativity. The non-actualities created spontaneously by individual intelligences are not mysteriously injected from outside, are not expressions of an occult cosmic teleology, vital libidinal force in nature, or a disembodied super-intelligence. They are just what they seem to be: creations of particular embodied intelligences. It is undeniable that intelligences are sponges of the creations of other intelligences, of culture, and that many non-actualities are manipulated by culture and imitated by individuals, and so originate from outside in that sense. However, culture is entirely the product of the creativity of previous multitudes of individual intelligences.

The Pluralism of Freedom

The currently standard conception of freedom is well represented by the Freudian model described in the previous posting cited above. On that model, it makes no sense to say that freedom comes from individual nature (biology manifested as the compulsive drives of id) or from individual ego-personality (merely a pattern of balance among external forces), but only as something from the superego, something arranged socially and culturally, a quality of the constraints and opportunities visited upon individuals by institutions of sovereignty, deity, and economics. Freedom defined in that way is a sort of revokable parental indulgence like borrowing the family car, which isn’t an impressive freedom. The considerations of actuality and non-actuality presented above uncover a different freedom, a freedom that is inalienable from individual intelligences. On this re-conceptualized system of reality, freedom is an inherent feature of any individual intelligence, and, most important of all, such freedom suddenly establishes a bottom-up reality.

Currently, what might seem like an uneasy co-existence of Medieval Christian and modern scientific systems of reality is in fact the co-operation of two systems that have much in common. There is an easy transition from monotheism to science, since both are examples of top-down visions, both conceiving a cosmic force or set of forces determining everything in every particular detail. Scientific materialism replaces the omnipotent god with omnipotent universal laws. Asserting the transcendent freedom of individuals-as-such departs decisively from the exclusivity of science for understanding events, but not only that. It also departs decisively from the whole historically dominant tradition of top-down metaphysics which includes both religions and science. Top-down metaphysics is an abstraction from social subjugation, which, in a most vicious circle, is ideologically mutated into a distorted vision of transcendence and then used to legitimize the worldly subjugation. Departing from the exclusivity of science will challenge those committed to modern visions of reality. Departing from the exclusivity of religion will sorely try others. However, this recognition of transcendence in individuals is implicit in the evolution through Stoicism and Epicureanism, to Wycliffe, to Luther, to the radical Enlightenment, and to Kant and Fichte, not to mention the immediate personal experience of intelligence.

We have to re-conceptualize the prevailing system of reality so that intelligences do not disappear as we currently do into pre-determined nature or into other-worldly eternity, but instead stand as autonomous and creative forces at the level of every individual. Separating intelligences off from nature, without removing ourselves to a metaphysical cloud of eternity, changes conceptions of both nature and community, the other pillars of cultural reality. It changes the concept of nature by removing nature as the be-all and end-all explanation and justification of the entire status quo, specifically by removing from nature the ultimate sources of individual behaviour and force, such as from a biologically determined will-to-power which makes individuals little more than missiles of self-gratification. Nature remains as the sum total of the strictly and categorically actual, distinct from all non-actualities such as past and future.

The observation that transcendence is not external to individuals but instead is internal to every intelligence is not new. Fichte, for example, can be cited as someone who declared it, but the idea is common. We read such things as, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” The problem is that nobody seems able to remain true to that idea, apparently because of the ingrained top-down structure of historical systems of reality. There is always a drift away from ordinary individuals toward some metaphysical cosmic force or intelligence, an absolute I or a vital creative dimension to all existence, which concludes by once again rendering the ordinary individual-as-such completely unfree and alienated from the origin of agency and creativity. This also becomes an excuse for embracing the tragic or Romantic-nihilist view of life, the view that injustice is an essential part of the cosmic process so that no one is accountable and nothing can be done about it (for example, in Foucault following Nietzsche).

Re-Conceptualizing Community and Transcendent Self-Possession

Both actual and potential forms of community are re-modelled when individual intelligences are recognized as autonomously creative. Separating intelligences off from nature to recognize the creative freedom of individuals creates a far different potential for empathic interconnectedness as the foundation of community. The animalistic/ instinctual urges become individually manageable and non-lethally pleasurable, put into proportion by the pleasures of expressing an ever-developing personal creative process, as well as by the exciting enlargement that individuals experience in sustainable attachments with others. The need for ownership-type superegos structured into social organization disappears entirely. In this light the existing society is revealed as structures of top-down human-on-human parasitism, sustained by cultural distortions obscuring and legitimizing the entrenched parasitism. Recognizing the parasitic impulse in the fabric of all hierarchical institutions and systems of subordination, especially those of sovereign states and commercial corporations (power and wealth), reveals immediately that messages within ambient culture about the preciousness of civilization as a matrix of high values and personal elevation or fulfillment are all malign manipulations, against which the only defence is identification of points of reference prior to and independent of cultural programming. That defence is a philosophical thinking which establishes for each individual a transcendent self-possession within a bottom-up system of reality, emphasizing everybody’s personal predicament of being in a life, with the unceasing urgencies of building that life laboriously in an embodied particularity made elastic and indefinite by the creative powers of an individual intelligence.

Note: Here are some views of Fichte:

Romanticism, A German Affair, written by Rudiger Safranski, translated from German by Robert E. Goodwin, published by Northwestern University Press (2014), ISBN 978-0-8101-2653-4.

Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799, written by Anthony J. La Vopa, Published by Cambridge University Press (2001), ISBN-10: 0521791456, ISBN-13: 978-0521791458.

The Roots of Romanticism, written by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy, Published by Princeton University Press (2001), ISBN-10: 0691086621, ISBN-13: 978-0691086620.

Two Lessons from History: Mutable Reality

15 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Culture, Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity

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anarchy, culture, Enlightenment, freedom, Freud, intelligence, nature, philosophy, Plato, reality, sovereignty, Thomas Hobbes

Of the two lessons from history mentioned in the title, the bad news lesson was sketched in the previous posting. The second lesson inspires more optimism, and it is that there was a philosophically led cultural movement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries called the Enlightenment, the accomplishments of which we treasure more as their fragility becomes more and more evident. The three most influential Enlightenment philosophers, on Jonathan I. Israel’s view, were Benedict Spinoza (1631-77), Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), and Denis Diderot (1713-84). In light of the lesson from history sketched in the previous posting, it is clear that the Enlightenment movement was not an unqualified success, although it was and is very far from being ineffectual. In all of history, only that philosophical movement has made noteworthy progress against the entrenched culture of human parasitism, and that was done with a three punch combination.

One punch was a new cultural wave of materialist science. The scientific perspective began to undermine the religion and metaphysics that promoted the legitimacy of top-down parasite factions within Christendom: monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical hierarchies. Descartes, Hobbes, and others of their generation were crucial in that conceptual groundwork for science, breaking away from Aristotelian-religious ideas as previously codified by Thomas Aquinas. The conceptions of materialist science were persuasive and far-reaching enough to create structural instability and a cultural vacuum in the orientation system of Old Regime reality. A ‘system of reality’ is a culturally supplied collective orientation constructed from stories (tragedy and comedy, heroes and villains), sacred texts, laws, oral descriptions, warnings, exhortations, explanations, popular aspirations, as well as typical ways of acting and material culture, altogether enabling individuals to operate with a semi-stable sense of three crucial givens: nature, community, and individual subjective interiority. The cultural instability in Old Regime Christendom caused by scientific ideas enabled the effectiveness of a second Enlightenment punch: a campaign of strengthening the dignity and autonomy of individuals, in contrast to the Augustinian concept of human nature tainted and enslaved by original sin. That was done by recognizing universally distributed rationality: an individually innate human ability to judge what is true and real based entirely on commonly available perceptions. The previous history of the spread of proletarian literacy from the time of Wycliffe in the fourteenth century was crucial in this increasing dignity and power of human nature at the individual level. Philosophers of the radical stream of the Enlightenment presented rationality as empowering bottom-up control of society, re-enforcing universal equality, human rights, and democracy, specifically contradicting any top-down social control in the name of rationality now routinely blamed on the Enlightenment.

The third punch was a promotion of the autonomous application of rationality for the most ambitious philosophical thinking, for a re-conceptualization of the most fundamental realities without appeal to any kind of ‘superego’ such as the omniscient/ omnipotent deity supposedly expressed through established authorities, both religious and civic. Re-thinking reality is distinctly a philosophical project, evading culture with intent to re-model culture, and the enlightenment movement was self-consciously philosophical. ‘Philosophical’ meant making use of rationality without religious assumptions of cosmic or divine purpose for people, without cosmic teleology or any kind of external superego. (Teleology does not necessarily mean cosmic purpose, divine purpose, or purpose in nature.) ‘Philosophical’ meant ‘rationally non-religious’ and consequently de-centralized, asserting a pluralism and diversity of thinking quite foreign to religious cultures.

The radical rationalists of the Enlightenment era re-conceptualized all three branches of the Christian system of reality: nature, community, and individual subjectivity. In medieval and Old Regime reality the human essence was thought to be an immortal soul or spirit, truly at home in a realm of eternity outside and above nature (nature considered as the realm of time or semi-delusional becoming in which human souls are temporarily stranded and tested) and every soul’s destiny was thought to be determined entirely by an omnipotent and eternal deity. The radical rationalists re-conceived nature scientifically as a strictly physical system of ‘clockwork’ completely free of disembodied spirits and their power, free of cosmic teleology, purpose, or destiny. They re-conceived individual subjectivity as universally educable to rationality and capable of spontaneous rationality, even though usually trained by existing institutions to a condition of non-rational credulity, superstition, and abject deference to entrenched authorities. The Enlightenment rationalists upset the Christian system of reality by bringing the human essence back from eternity into nature, rejecting all super-natural entities or realms of being, and then arguing that in the primordial ‘state of nature’, prior to establishment of arbitrary social conventions, all people would have had equal freedoms and rights. In that way, society was re-conceived as a system of equal persons with equal rights and freedoms of thought, expression, and association, best organized as a democratic republic (bottom-up political force). This thorough re-conceptualization of the system of reality profoundly weakened the legitimacy of monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical hierarchies.

The strongest social and cultural authorities have always persisted in an anti-enlightenment campaign, for obvious reasons. The cultural and political situation at the launch of the twenty-first century reveals that elements of the enlightenment re-conceptualization of reality failed the test of determined opposition. Enlightenment theory contained some flaws and mis-conceptions. Still, the intent here is to learn lessons from the Enlightenment about re-thinking reality so as to reach a point in history where we get beyond the influence of human parasites.

The Current System

The Freudian model of individual subjectivity is a fair codification of the currently prevailing system of reality. Since Freud, it has been common to explain social behaviour, culture, and history as projections of human psychology, always expressing strictly natural forces, forces other than individual creative freedom. The parasite culture loves a conception of subjectivity dominated by natural drives or universal compulsions because such impulses are reliably available to be culturally triggered, stimulated, managed, manipulated, channelled, and controlled so as to sustain a set of mass demands that can be supplied at a profitable price, for example, or to arrange mass lessons and training exercises in obedience and subordination such as wars. In addition, the apparently chaotic and atomizing force of such compulsions provides a convenient excuse to insist on institutionalizing some version of a great unquestionable parent, structuring reality to include an authoritarian power which parasite factions intend to reserve for themselves to occupy and operate. In the Freudian model, that parental role is called the ‘superego’. Historically earlier systems of reality featured myths of disembodied super-intelligent powers such as gods and demons, or an all-determining realm of eternity, whose power accounted for and sanctified the worldly power of the parasites. Modern theorists often proceed from the observation that there just are social supervisors, no matter what their legitimacy or origin, and people must become “well adjusted” by internalizing their influence. However, in the absence of ‘just so stories’ or appeals to divine intervention in appointing social supervisors, the modern system of reality falls back onto social contract theory as a foundation for social authority figures.

Hobbes’ vision of the ‘state of nature’ is a decently accurate description of the culture-world of will-to-power masculinity (distinct from human nature, even though Hobbes presented it as human nature), always on the brink of war of all against all. On the Hobbesian vision, the carriers of the masculine will-to-power avoid the all-destructive war of anarchy by agreeing to acquire the benefits of social order and civil society by instituting a contract by which a sovereign, with absolute power over life and death, is established to decree laws by which all will be bound (when they can’t evade enforcement). The social contract essentially confers ultimate and unlimited ownership of persons and properties upon the sovereign. So, from nothing more than cowboy rational self-interest (now assumed to be determined biologically), authority figures of civil society emerge to constrain the many anarchic expressions of self-interest, naturally pre-determined compulsive egoism. This is a vision which has eliminated transcendence completely, satisfying the demands of respectability imposed by science. Hobbesian theory, from Leviathan, like Plato’s model of the three-part soul from Republic, is one of those intellectual images of reality which became ingrained in culture at many levels, to the point of being considered obvious and difficult to question.

The Freudian Model

When Plato’s ancient but perennial model of a three-part subjectivity (expressed outwardly in a stratified society) is combined with Hobbes’ theory of socially contracted sovereignty, what emerges is codified in Freud’s model of personality or subjectivity, from which the term “superego” is taken along with the other elements of the structure, namely “id” and “ego”. (Schopenhauer and Nietzsche had already developed these ideas.) In that model, the main vectors of force are the id, bestial lusts for pleasure, sparkly things, power, and status (the lower two-thirds of Plato’s model, on the Freudian view reducible to nature in the form of biological compulsions); and the superego, representing authority figures from ambient society such as parents, teachers, priests, and police, internalized within each individual’s subjectivity by exposure to education, religion, and secular socialization. Those two vectors of force, nature and society, confront and balance one another in every person’s subjectivity, and at their point of balance a semi-stable image seems to appear, an image called the ego, the individual personality. There is no original or autonomous force or substance to that ego on this model, no reality. The ego has only the force of id as bent into some semblance of social conformity by the force of authority figures. That is all there is to an individual Freudian-type intelligence, really just another iteration of the pre-Lutheran Christian vision of human nature enslaved by original sin but civilized by the ever-ready whips and gallows of Church and military-monarchical states.

So, Freud’s model of the individual’s psychological interior is a structure of three elemental positions, two of which are forces: the set of instinctive or biological drives collectively called the id, and the aforementioned superego consisting of internalized authority or parental figures featuring officials of various kinds representing the institutional realities of sovereignty and deity, the ultimate and unlimited owners of all persons and property. Between the id and the superego is the image called the ego, and it is all position and no original force or content, merely the balancing point between instinctive drives and socially derived constraints. That ego, nothing more than a semi-stable image, can be recognized as another view of “zombie shells” (invoked in earlier posts) when other forces of social influence are considered, such as role models among peers influencing appearance, interests, and attitudes toward people in various economic situations, people with different ways of making a living; and also role models thrown up by teachers or media personalities, for example, in terms of careers, style of life, appearances of pleasure, power, and status. Everyone needs to be accepted socially, and so has to conform to some accepted style of life and style of person. All these social approvals/ disapprovals are forces which shape a person’s outward presentation into an image of a social personality, an ego. However, that image of personality is not created by social pressures and biological compulsions alone, but most importantly by an individual intelligence managing those forces while remaining quite distinct from the ego image.

The Thinking Subject

We need to re-model the system of reality codified in the Freudian vision by adding a new creative force, namely individual intelligence, which creates the ego image as part of its management of a whole array of impulses and forces acting on it. The social and cultural dominance of parasite factions can never be complete or irrevocable because of an elemental, autonomous, and creative freedom to individual intelligences (simply as intelligences) which asserts itself and which, in asserting itself, is able to recognize and to mark its divergence from forces tending to control, deceive, and diminish it. One of the ways in which individual freedom asserts itself is in thinking about itself within a system of reality and developing self-awareness and self-identification, which is to say, in a sort of philosophical thinking.

Thinking is self-directed reorientation in increasingly refined and elaborated questioning, acting on specific curiosity in searching experiences to open the world in novel patterns of recognition and identification. That reorienting search is not entirely directed outward. Ideas are not imposed on intelligence by sensations. There are two surprise horizons at play in the individual’s process of reorientation. Inseparable from the outward sensory reach there is also an inward opening to growth and development in the integration and restructuring of accumulated bearings from past experience and so to what is being sought, in the specifics of curiosity, wonder, or questioning, in a sense of possibilities, patterns, or ideas. Inseparable from that is a developing sense of what it is that is curious and questions and gazes and listens and opens to new recognitions and new bearings, of thinking as a personal creative act. Individuals create completely original and unique states or shapes of orientation, just in the course of the ordinary process of building a particular life. Although linguistic utterances are often used in reorientation, they are not the main story. The reality of thinking without language is important since language is culture and loaded with the malice of parasitic influence. Thinking without language is just reorienting in patterns far too complex to be codified in language. Language is too rigid structurally, rule-bound, too standard and conventional to help much in self-directed reorienting. The sense of effortful, metabolically costly embodiment is more important. From personal curiosity you seek out the niche aspects of experience, previously unidentified within the increasingly big picture, which open new prospects you are ready to explore and to mark.

Archaic Superegos

The subjective interiority described in the standard Freudian model is a culturally programmed nearly-reality, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Superegos do loom large for most individuals. The individual’s sense of self-definition is often not much more than an image or shell patched together from cultural fragments, and appetites and competitive spirit are culturally triggered and encouraged along certain channels. However, this model and the nearly-reality it depicts are products of parasitic cultural influences and profoundly misrepresent individual intelligences. Just as radical rationalists of the Enlightenment era built on certain cultural legacies which increase the recognition of dignity and power in individual intelligences, maintaining progress requires another assertion of individual autonomy.

The autonomous force of intelligence is far richer than the instinctive-biologically driven id. There is an intelligence in a particular natural and cultural situation building a sustainable life. That intelligence is very far from being identical with the ego image, although it constructs the ego image to survive. History shows that superegos all represent the control of top-down parasite culture, driven by malign and ignoble origins, pretences, and motives. Superegos all claim ownership of the individual subject, both body and subjectivity, at the same time as doing their utmost to obscure and disguise their actual parasitism. There is no legitimacy to any ownership of individual intelligences, and so it is crucial to repudiate the claim of parasite factions and institutions to own individuals. To be un-owned is an absolute requirement of freedom, by definition and in practice. Anyone undertaking to think philosophically, for example, must not be owned but must be consciously autonomous. To abandon superegos is to recognize your own condition of not-being-owned, and in doing that, you have to recognize the same for every other individual intelligence. Philosophy can never be an assertion of top-down intellectual authority because it throws authority to every individual, based entirely on the power of intelligence-as-such.

As a consequence of recognizing the autonomous power of individual intelligences, the currently prevailing system of reality as depicted in the Freudian model can and should be re-constructed by removing superegos completely. The normal fear raised to justify the necessity of superegos or sovereign supervisors is the vision of individuals as missiles of compulsive self-gratification, but that is only true of individuals conditioned to the traditional culture of will-to-power masculinity. When that cultural conditioning is unloaded, what is left is a much more complicated innocent intelligence which empathically recognizes and responds to the presence of other separate intelligences. The innate importance and force of individual intelligence means that abandoning all forms of the superego does not unleash the bestial lusts of nature in the form of id, but rather unleashes the individual to realize its autonomy and creative power, which includes the force for empathic interconnectedness. The only way to have an authentic morality is by developing the innocent empathy that remains when the cultural influences are removed that insist on defining some persons in such a way as to legitimize the use of them as hosts for parasitic purposes. Anyway, superegos founded in human parasitism are strictly absurd as guardians of morality. Their whole way of being is anti-empathic immorality.

The individual self-construct needs to be re-conceived by displacing instinctive drives with intelligent questioning, an intelligence searching for empathic interconnectedness. (Please see blog posting 77, November 19, 2014, Of Questions and Freedom: A Paradigm Shift for Intelligent Motivation.) This paradigm shift has the effect of re-constructing or re-modelling the whole system of modern reality. It requires that we re-model reality to recognize a discontinuity between unfree nature and free intelligences, to open a space for individual freedom in spite of the brute determinism of nature, especially in the form of biological compulsions. It was the radical Enlightenment rationalists who originally brought the idea of a human essence back from eternity into time and nature, but they were only partly right. They were right that the discontinuity is not as imagined in Christianity, but it isn’t as if we can de-couple intelligences completely from nature. Although individual intelligences are describable as separate universes of time and orientation, each is a universe that is oriented to the world of nature and fundamentally in love with other intelligences with whom it engages always through the medium of nature. It can’t float off to some ethereal cloud of eternity, because intelligence couldn’t construct teleological time without an engagement with nature. What is crucial is a recognition that culture expresses more than nature, that understanding culture requires a recognition of individual creative intelligences.

Note: My impressions of the Enlightenment are largely from the monumental Enlightenment trilogy by Jonathan I. Israel, specifically cited in previous postings.

Finishing the Work of the Enlightenment (Part 2 of 2)

22 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Hierarchy, Leadership, Political Power

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History, philosophy, politics

Enlightenment Rationalism in Perspective

The rationalism of the Enlightenment is sometimes blamed for major problems of modernity such as the militaristic organization of the economy, an inhumane corporate obsession with efficiency, environmental destruction arising from alienation of human-kind from nature, and the subversion of democracy by corporate interests. Nietzsche (no fan of democracy) blamed ‘the academic voice’ (a rational style of discourse he traced back to Socrates) for sucking the fun and vitality out of life. Such charges are false and ill founded. What is really sucking vitality and causing the destruction of the planet is the cultural poison of legitimized top-down parasitism that derives from a very particular historical source. In modernity the profit-collecting class is exercising industrial scale parasitism on the whole planet.

Back to The Revolution

The attack of radical rationalists against the legitimacy of totalitarian Christian supervision of society was so effective in the long run that by the time of the French Revolution of 1789 the sovereign power structure in France had been effectively discredited in the popular mind by the spread of rationalist ideas. That was a main event in the slow historical spiral of revolt by which Christendom withered and Modernity emerged, and it was effective enough to enable the Revolution. The Revolution reveals profound hostility toward the crime-family aristocracy in addition to the Church, and also shows acute consciousness of the culture of top-down human-on-human parasitism, misleadingly called “the class war”. However, that consciousness and hostility was strongest among the rural/ agricultural proletariat and not so much among the educated urban commercial and professional classes who also had substantial involvement in the Revolution and in the eventual restoration of civic order. Those urban classes wanted to emulate and benefit from certain features of the crime-family success story, and so they complained about specific practices only, for example, about trade monopolies or prejudicial taxes and fees which they found too restrictive for their aspirations. There was never a penetrating and sustained historical-conceptual critique of aristocratic/ crime-family culture, the parasitic and predatory alpha-trophy-looting culture which was the other foundation of sovereign power in a profound partnership with patriarchal Christianity. That partnership was so profound because both had cultural origins in parasitic nomadic animal herder societies.

The Enlightenment critique of Christian authority succeeded in discrediting the pretensions of both Church and aristocracy to sovereignty by divine appointment, and both of those groups began to wither away, but the military-based institutions by which sovereign power was practiced and projected were enduring models of control which the new rising lot of commercial/ professional crime-families exploited to defend their own legitimacy as effective sovereigns. There are always varieties of crime-families eager to take the places of any that get exposed and put out of business. Since the conceptual foundations of the Old Regime mechanisms or institutions of power were never objects of a thorough discrediting critique, they were simply accepted and conserved on the basis presented by Hobbes, the claim that the only alternative to them was a jungle-like war of all against all. Even Rousseau advised that the institutions of sovereign authority and law should be honoured. Consequently, ‘modernity’ emerged as a period when the culture of power was only partly understood, only partly deconstructed.

Top-Down Political Force on Debate about Crime

One cultural reality-distortion that follows from the uncompleted work of the Enlightenment is that, based on the influence of well-funded right-wing political propaganda, political debate remains silent about, and apparently blind to, top-down human-on-human parasitism at the same time as keeping up a continuous campaign to alarm the public about bottom-up parasitism in the form of petty crimes. There is a connection between the political correctness of never mentioning top-down capitalist power in democracies and the right-wing “tough on crime” alarmism about bottom-up parasitism. The connection is that attention on the political force of capitalist ownership families would risk revealing the top-down human-on-human parasitism of the culture they accept and practice, far more destructive than the kind of crime that is commonly recognized as such. It is a blatant tactic to divert public attention away from the cultural source of intractable criminality. The only real solution to bottom-up crime is the eradication of legitimized top-down parasitism.

Only now, with so much more research into history enabling an identification of top-down human-on-human parasitism (developed from parasitic and predatory animal herding and elaborated into the alpha-trophy-looting culture of masculinity and of uber-masculine crime-families and father-God-in-the-sky religions) as the oppression and malaise at the core of western concepts of sovereignty, executive power, and leadership, can we have a chance to finish the work of the Enlightenment. Now we have to face the fact that the deepest of ancient evil, transmitted culturally, escaped the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Revolution, and still remains in operation at the foundation of our poisoned conceptions of power, hierarchy, social inequality, meritocracy, and sovereignty, for example, not to mention the specific and blatant instances of class, race, and gender parasitism. So the self-justifying culture of the ownership class is only one head of the many-headed cultural legacy of ancient human parasitism. On the bright side, it is still possible to recapitulate the successful strategies of the rationalist Enlightenment, appropriately updated, in marshalling insights into the interiority of individual intelligence. To do that we identify the principles and grounds of our liberating re-orientation.

Vital Knowledge: Documenting the Historical Arc of Top-Down Parasitic Culture

It isn’t necessary to take any particular person’s word for the historical arc of culture. A few books of recent historical research, listed below, make it convincingly clear. What is so inspiring about these works is that the careful and determined accuracy about particular details of events, conditions, and ideas is combined with an equally determined questing and searching for, and recognition of, large scale arcs which are intrinsic to the sense and reality of the details. They create in that way a breathtaking vision, synthesized from masses of observations and pieces of evidence.

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, written by Jack Weatherford, Published by Crown (2004), ISBN: 0609610627.

This is about formation of the massive Mongol empire, incorporating China, India, Iran, Mesopotamia, and Russia, conquered by armies of tribal nomadic animal herders who then facilitated the distribution and development of cultural elements that impressed them from the various societies they controlled. It has remarkable insight into social conditions in a completely lawless tribal society, in this case the society of the nomadic people of the Asian steppe. The second half has important insights into the flow of cultural property between China, Persia, and India enabled by the Mongol empire in the thirteenth century. The author’s claim is that this flow also branched off into Europe and created the European renaissance by the fifteenth century. It is a wonderfully un-western view of world history which attempts to restore the credit due to the great Asian civilization which flourished as never before under Mongol administration roughly between 1211 and 1332, ended finally by the great bubonic plague which spread from China to the Atlantic. It is impossible that the thriving of that Asian civilization would not have drawn the admiration and imitation of western Europe. Marco Polo is an individual instance of the cultural diffusion into Europe.

1215: The Year of Magna Carta, written by Danny Danziger and John Gillingham, Published byTouchstone (2005), ISBN-10: 0743257782, ISBN-13: 978-0743257787.

An illuminating glimpse of life in Europe at an important moment in the development of law. At that moment it was perfectly clear that the social layer made up of the landowning aristocracy or nobility was nothing other than crime-families.

Radical Enlightenment : Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, written by Jonathan I. Israel, Published by Oxford University Press (2002), ISBN: 0199254567.

This is packed with information about the Enlightenment and readable through the whole 720 pages. Quite a writing accomplishment, among other things.

The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume I: The Complete Text, written by Alexis de Tocqueville, edited and with an Introduction and critical apparatus by Francois Furet and Francoise Melonio, translated by Alan S. Kahan, Published by University of Chicago Press (2004), ISBN: 0226805301 (0-226-80530-1).

This is a fascinating follow-up to Radical Enlightenment because it documents the political consequences of what the Enlightenment movement of ideas had accomplished.

A History of Western Political Thought, written by J. S. McClelland, Published by Routledge (1996), ISBN-10: 0415119626, ISBN-13: 978-0415119627.

The first four historical studies listed just above provide a perspective from which to interpret this stunning overview of political theory. It is striking that, in spite of the philosophical effort to remove demons from descriptions of nature, the main effort of political theory has been to justify something very close to the familiar structure of power at the time and place the theory was being written, almost as if “to justify the ways of God to man”! It was probably that sort of observation that persuaded Karl Marx that economic conditions determine ideas. However, the point it illustrates is that the parasitism that is familiar and in power over a stable human collective is very difficult to think about and to identify for what it is. Watch for discussions of the iron law of oligarchy. Also watch for the discussion of: “embourgeoisment” (pp. 655-657). Enjoy.

Finishing the Work of the Enlightenment (Part 1of 2)

14 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Culture, Equality, Hierarchy, Narrative, Political Power

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History, philosophy, politics

The Philosophical Tradition of Cultural Detox

The projects of ancient philosophy included removal of demons, spirits, and gods from descriptions of nature, in other words, removal of a certain kind of cultural poison that disabled the full power of individual thinking. For the Hellenistic Epicureans, for example, the cultural poison that included belief in various gods resulted in unnecessary anguish, worry, pain, and unhappiness. Roughly 1700 years after the Epicurean movement flourished, the work of the European cultural movement known as the Enlightenment continued that tradition. The work of the Enlightenment was to remove similar poisons which were being used to legitimize the exercise of sovereign power to stifle freedom of thought, for example, by the burning alive of the philosopher Giordano Bruno in 1600 in Rome.

Considering subjective interiority in the context of politics, the Enlightenment stands as an historical precedent for the effectiveness of that interiority against the propaganda of a crime-family oligarchy. During the European “radical Enlightenment” (roughly 1650-1750), and to a lesser extend earlier, during the Renaissance, philosophical humanists made an appeal to “innate rationality” which empowered every individual to question, and to understand the fallacies of, religious superstitions enshrined in Christianity, the religion that legitimized and even sanctified brutal sovereign power. The work of the Enlightenment was to remove cultural justifications for top-down human-on-human parasitism (a concept of life inherited from nomadic animal herders) from Old Regime European culture, and indeed some cultural poison, involved with the sovereignty of the Church as messenger of God, was discredited, a verifiable instance of progress in history.

During the Old Regime (the period of European history between the Renaissance and the French Revolution of 1789) the oligarchy of a crime-family class was quite overt, explicit, and widely acknowledged, but the ideology used to legitimize the powers, privileges, and immunities of that aristocracy had become Christianized. The oligarchy was assumed to have been somewhat tamed and sanitized by its traditional association with organized Christianity, which formed the mediating class of pre-modern European culture. Ultimate justification for sovereignty came from the Christian God’s active engagement in the world, as proclaimed and celebrated constantly by the pervasive organization of the Church. With Machiavelli’s political philosophy (please see posting 46, December 7, 2012, Machiavelli’s Prince) it was recommended that the Renaissance should include a kind of crime-family coup against the senior supervisory authority of the Church. The crime-family aristocracy judged that it had established itself as pack leader on the ground sufficiently to do without the senior partnership of the Church, a judgment bolstered by their claim to create ordered civilization merely by their effective monopoly of armed violence (also made explicit and provided with ideological support by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)). Aristocracy considered social order itself to be their independent claim to be agents of God. However, in spite of that claim to independent legitimacy as sovereign controllers, it turned out that they could not do without some claim of divine intervention in their dominance over others, and the Church still owned the patents on divine will in the popular mind.

The conduct of aristocracy was nasty enough to alienate a lot of people, and when they had to justify their dominance, their strongest claim was always that the whole of existing reality was ordained by God, and the Church could hardly do anything but support that. Consequently, when the carriers of humanist philosophy in the Republic of Letters launched their critique of sovereign ideology, it was specifically religious ideology that was their focus. Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, published in 1670, was an inspirational event of that movement. The struggle went on long before and after the period 1650-1750, and it eventually succeeded, largely, in de-throning the claims of Church officials and aristocrats to be messengers of God in their disempowerment and exploitation of ordinary individuals.

From a broader point of view, however, that whole effort was only half the battle, because the cultural basis of the strictly aristocratic “half” of medieval oligarchy, the culture of top-down human-on-human parasitism, a concept of life derived from nomadic animal herders, was never identified as part of the fundamental oppression in the organizational culture of western civilization, and the real malaise of the west. Hobbes’ view of the social contract (an important model for Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)) was very much myth instead of history, an over-rationalized and sanitized narrative to account for the existing institutions of civic order, including law and private property. Neither Hobbes nor Rousseau knew, nor could have known, history in enough accurate detail to trace the actual derivation of sovereign power. The parasitism of nomadic herder culture, and its legacy in the culture of crime-families, was not mentioned or considered by either of them. Hobbes, as a courtier, was thinking from a comfortable position inside the privileges enjoyed by sovereign power. Rousseau, in thinking that common people had been tricked into giving up their rights for the social contract, was wrongly assuming that people had surrendered their rights and now had no alternative but to accept the instituted structure of power. At least Rousseau sensed that injustice had been institutionalized, which was an advance beyond Hobbes.

in the blind spot

~ Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

Category Archives: Class War

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Finishing the Work of the Enlightenment (Part 2 of 2)

Finishing the Work of the Enlightenment (Part 1of 2)